After a week which saw Today FM celebrate its newfound status as a national radio station (230,000 listeners! More than 8 per cent of adults "listened yesterday"!!), its Sunday Supplement produced a rather dull 'n' worthy effort of the sort that more often graces the original national radio station.
This took the form of a two-hour link-up with Downtown Radio in the North for a phone-in about the Belfast Agreement. Presented by Harry Castles in the North and Matt Cooper in the South, the format was stodgy and over-diplomatic, with first a Northern call, then a Southern one, then a Northern one, etc.
Moreover, there could have been more care taken with screening and sequencing the calls; for one 15minute period the "debate" bounced back and forth between two callers from Bangor and two from Donegal - I know all politics is local, but that was a bit much. If anyone here was expecting hands across the Border to tug at our heartstrings, we were soon put right. The calls to Downtown Radio were largely from unionists taking the opportunity to complain about various aspects of the South; one pointedly commented that it was no problem for the State to renounce its Constitutional claim to the North now that it actually has been given executive power there.
Peace-and-reconciliation types won't have been cheered, either, by the show's telepoll. Callers to the Today FM vote-lines were 70-30 in favour of the agreement, but the Northern calls ran 61-39 against. This over-used polling method is generally misleading: if it measures anything, it's not the popularity of a position but the passionate intensity of those who hold it. But even that should be a worry.
Sure, this column periodically goes all gooey about the cool and clever broadcasting skills of Myles Dungan, but we've also suspected (tipped off by his enthusiasm for stuff like golf and Arsenal) that Myles is John Bowman's natural successor as RTE's number-one nerd. When, a few weeks back, the press release arrived to tell us that had produced and presented - voluntarily, it must be presumed - a 13-part series (ouch) about the "myths and legends of the American frontier" (yick) that would go out on (get this) Sundays at 9.30 p.m., we reckoned we had evidence of more blinding clarity than one of his jumpers.
Well, hot-diggety, when True West (tiny nod to Sam Shepard) opened with the swelling music and John Wayne soundbites, we had our man dead to rights. Or did we? Sunday's first programme in the series was - as it often the case with these starter episodes - a little on the broad side (from coast to coast and leaping through the centuries), but it pointed the way to a fascinating revisionist account of stuff we think we know about already.
Like, I wonder how many of the audiences who have sniggered at Blazing Saddles for the last 25 years were aware of historians' estimates that one-third of late 19thcentury cowboys were black. Or how many of us have considered the bald, mercantile logic dictating that "cowtowns" should provide saloons and brothels for the west's low-paid, transient cattle-drivers, but also some peace and security for their permanent population.
We might already have doubted the myths about gun-law and shoot-outs, and the more copped-on among us would have recognised the absurdity of the term "frontier" to mask the Anglo-American invasion of a well populated and socially complex continent. Still, it was great to hear the top historians in the field putting these ideas to rest (and I hope we'll hear more detail about "pre-frontier" America as the series goes on).
Another running theme, I suspect, will be contemporary mythmaking - beyond the familiar self-publicist, Buffalo Bill Cody. Daniel Boone, we heard, quickly became a legendary Indian-fighter in spite of his love for Indians and regret about the (only) three he killed. Davy Crockett, on the other hand, deliberately used his rugged frontiersman image as a vote-grabber to earn a seat in Congress. Yeeha!
