To judge by the way radio stations reacted to the announcement on Friday, you'd think the Nobel Peace Prize was widely regarded as a politically suspect and morally bereft token, devalued by the history of both its original patron and many of its recipients.
Of course we know now that it is only narrowly regarded in those terms, that our culture, as it is reflected in our media, views the prize as a fitting reward for true peacemakers. Still, it was funny that the radio was relatively quiet about it for a little while on Friday morning.
There were exceptions. "Quiet" is never a word you'd apply to journalist Eamonn Mallie, and he was in fine, noisy form on Friday morning in his guise as Today FM's Northern editor. Everyone knew the Nobel announcement was due at 10 a.m. The various stations managed to slip notes to their newsreaders to update the "announcement expected" story into an "I've just been told . . ." story. However, Gerry Ryan on 2FM didn't reckon it was worth pursuing immediately, while Pat Kenny on RTE Radio 1 mentioned it and moved on. The folks on BBC Radio 5 Live didn't seem to notice at all.
However, Today FM's Mark Cagney quickly had the call in place to Eamonn Mallie, who was ready with a well-prepared potted biography of John Hume and a slightly more impromptu reading of the significance of David Trimble's share of the prize. It wasn't bad work at all for a music programme.
And Mallie wasn't finished. Twenty minutes later, as journalists doorstepped Hume for a quickie press conference, Today with Pat Kenny did indeed go live to the scene. Which journalist's voice had a virtual monopoly on the questioning? You guessed it. Today FM didn't join that melee until later, and Mallie obliged by repeating the standard "personal feelings" opener: "John Hume, for Today FM, can you tell us . . .?" Hume was only momentarily startled by the repetition; he's a fair old hand at that game himself, and swung back into his standard response. But Mallie's question had a dual effect: not only did it let Today FM listeners cut to the chase, but it advertised to the much larger audience on Radio 1 that the dominant journalistic voice at this juncture in history was working for the opposition. All in all, a decent half-hour's work.
Pat Kenny had other matters of war and peace on his mind last week. Country Joe McDonald - he of the 1960s anthem I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag - was in the studio to sing "One, two, three what are we fightin' for . . ." for the nostalgists, and to promote a truly strange proposal to bring a halfscale replica of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial that stands in Washington DC on tour to Ireland.
The sort-of pretext was that thousands of Irish-Americans, and a handful of Irish citizens, died in the US ranks. But it seemed more like part of the ongoing effort by American culture to universalise its soldiers' experience of the war as if it were the only reality - and, in effect, to suppress the murderous consequences for the Vietnamese and Cambodian people. It seemed to work with Pat. After Country Joe was gone, a caller complained about his suggestion that the memorial contains the names of "all those killed in the Vietnam War", when in fact it doesn't mention the Vietnamese. "I presume you're talking about the South Vietnamese Army, which fought alongside the Americans," Kenny said. I presume the caller meant the million people killed as a consequence of the US attack on Vietnam, but there you go; it seems they were mere extras in an American drama.
More war and politics featured in The Archive Hour: 50 Years of Any Questions (BBC Radio 4, Saturday), Jonathan Dimbleby hosting this entertaining review of the station's long-running flagship debate programme. In 1956, it seems, Any Questions still laboured under an extraordinary and strictly enforced rule that the questions and issues discussed had to be submitted two weeks in advance.
This may explain why in the tapes of old programmes the participants always sound so polished and actorly; perhaps they'd had time to rehearse. But it was certainly absurd when Britain waded into the Suez Crisis and the nation was up in arms - and Any Questions couldn't address the topic.
One participant resisted, and began talking about a hypothetical invasion, of Ruritania, and what might be his attitude to such an occurrence. In the great tradition of free speech on the airwaves, Auntie Beeb pulled the plug.
