If last week's media reports are to be believed - and they conform to an independently obtained rumour - then RTE is going for virtually the safest and soundest possible rearrangement of the Radio 1 deckchairs once Gay Byrne jumps ship at Christmas.
The casualties might include: Marian Finucane's nightlife with a new early commute; Joe Duffy's workload as he settles down to Liveline; and Pat Kenny's ego en route back to late-morning. New seating arrangements for man-inplace Des Cahill and perpetually rising souffle Carrie Crowley will have to be found in first class.
As life after Gaybo starts to take shape, a certain nostalgia creeps in - for Gay himself, anyway. Last Thursday's remarkable abortion segment on the Gay Byrne Show sounded very like a deliberate throwback to the days when his programme could shake up Middle Ireland at will.
In form, it was an echo of Marian Finucane's documentary from the Dark Eighties, when she accompanied a woman to England and back for an abortion. Gaybo's excellent reporter, Pat Costello, presented a shorter, less intimate variation, consisting of "before" and "after" interviews at a London clinic with 24-year-old "Roisin".
The brave Roisin, like Marian's subject before her, matter-of-factly humanised the issue, refusing to conform to stereotypes of the desperately bewildered young one or of the profoundly traumatised "victim" of abortion. What was more fascinating about the programme's presentation of her story, and of Costello's observations of the clinics, was its insistence that this was a voyage of discovery for the audience. Even while Gay used the (conservative) statistics about Irish women and abortion to set up his customary "let's face facts here" context, he didn't take the numbers to their logical conclusion: women who have had abortions are not "they" but "you" - tens of thousands of listeners who have been there, done that.
Costello reinforced the discovery angle by emphasising her own role as an Innocent Abroad, an Irish Everywoman who went to unfamiliar London expecting to find dingily-housed abortionists with addresses down dark alleys - and instead found Georgian houses or leafy suburban clinics with a fresh lick of paint in every waiting room.
Her emphasis, too, was on the normality and tranquility of the patients - women who "might have been waiting for a table in a restaurant". In effect, she was taking the blood, filth, gore and screams out of our image of abortion - but how many of us had that image anyway? Well, perhaps Roisin's mother. Maybe sanitising the process like this was important in de-contaminating the experience for Gay's main audience, middle-aged and older women whose only contact with abortion will be via daughters, nieces, granddaughters. If it helps even one of them to be more sympathetic, less horrified, then the programme will have done some good.
One big quibble, however: Roisin said she agreed to do the interview because of the terrible time she had obtaining information - buying English magazines hopefully in search of clinic ads. But nowhere that I heard immediately surrounding the segment, nor in Friday's follow-up, was her concern respected in the obvious way; information and referrals are perfectly legally available from the Irish Family Planning Association - would it have been so hard to mention that?
Gay's extreme distaste for the extreme anti-choice position was evident on Friday, as he read about an editorial in a Canadian archdioscesan newspaper which suggested that the latest murder of an abortion-performing doctor might do some good. He might have added that the US elections amounted to yet another repudiation of what might be called constitutional pro-life politics. Eamon Dunphy might also have mentioned this when he interviewed a US anti-abortion activist on The Last Word (Today FM); she didn't defend the murders, but she's well into clinic-doorstep prayer vigils (i.e. harassment) and got away with the bizarre characterisation of the National Organisation for Women as "a lesbian group".
Vincent Browne didn't harass Olivia O'Leary and Helen Burke on Tuesday over their Mary Robinson book (Tonight with Vincent Browne), but he sure got stuck in (and O'Leary shot back a few sparks of her own). He reached the heights of rudeness, and of entertaining radio, when he asked Eamonn McCann what he thought of this passage: "Travellers had been refused service in pubs, hotels and restaurants. Mary wanted them to feel at home in the Aras." The lads had a good laugh, you betcha.
In the week that's in it, Des Keogh deserves honourable mention for keeping Middle for Middlebrows going longer than the Gay Byrne Show. On Saturday he marked three decades of musical entertainment with an extended programme.
