IT WAS a helluva week for dramatic output on our air waves - the breathless newsbulletins from Dublin Castle bringing us each thickening of the plot, and Eamon Dunphy on Radio Ireland continuing to suggest some incredible twists.
In spite of the absence of TV cameras and radio microphones in the tribunal room, one programme was ambitious enough to turn this dramatic material into instant drama. Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday) was compelling listening all week: every night the day's testimony was excerpted and acted out, with Joe Taylor playing, in turn, Ben Dunne, Dick Spring, Ruairi Quinn, etc, and Kevin Reynolds imitating various senior counsel.
The pity is that the programme doesn't go out on Fridays, so Taylor missed his chance to portray Margaret Heffernan. Otherwise, this beat newspaper reports hands down, giving us the flavour as well as the substance of the testimony.
Since acting involves an interpretation of text, inevitable questions were raised. Could Dunne, for example, really be the innocent, boyish, thoroughly plausible culchie that Taylor made him sound like? But without the real thing, we make do with such questions; hopefully the programme - with Olivia O'Leary replacing Browne for the next three weeks - will go on with the show.
It was all a bit more exciting than the BBC Northern Ireland production of Molly Sweeney (BBC Radio 3, Sunday). I never saw the stage production of Brian Friel's work, but as I recall some of the unkinder critics suggested this static drama was more a radio play.
In spite of an engaging performance from Sorcha Cusack in the title role, that case was not successfully made here. Under Roland Jaquarello's direction, Molly Sweeney sounded like a text, a good think piece about language, blindness and transformations, with touches of allegory and moments of poignancy that created a mood but not much of an effect.
And Molly was absent for too much of it. Alan Barry and Ian McElhinney seemed to grow into the roles of Mr Rice and Frank Sweeney after some slightly perfunctory reading at the start, but this listener could have done with less of them.
Meanwhile, as Radio Ireland insists that it will broadcast some drama later in the year, RTE continues to do right by radio plays - certainly in terms of quantity, if not always of quality.
Last week we heard the winner of this year's P J O'Connor Award for playwrights, Balloon by Patrick Nolan (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday). This was the story of a pressurised Dublin businessman whose death involved a vision of being carried across Ireland in a helium balloon by a strange Welsh woman called Angeline (geddit?) Jones.
Balloon had its moments, it was a bit contrived and not a patch on the runner up, I Broke My Mother's Heart by Kevin McGee (RTE Radio 1, Friday). No balloon journeys here; in fact, not a lot happened at all: this half hour was confined to a bedroom in Nenagh, Co Tipperary, where a young gay man reflects wittily, and rather smuttily, on being HIV positive.
His musings include a sneer at the PC insistence on the term PLWA - person living with AIDS - "Jesus didn't die of crucifixion - he was a person living with copious loss of blood..."
The monologue also reveals that the prospect of an AIDS related death has led the character to experiment with drugs - figuring, what the hell? - and he imagines himself after death as a poster boy carrying a stern warning for young people: "HIV positivity is all well and good, but in a minority of cases it can lead to intravenous drug use."
Tipp FM's "Say No to Drugs" campaign - a tape of which the local station sent me last week - could do with this sort of leavening. The campaign uses scattered three minute tales of drug related tragedies to educate and inform (i.e. scare) kids about drugs. Like alcohol, valium, prozac, antibiotics. God, no, not in the samples I got, anyway, which followed four fictitious young people down that old dusty road from cannabis and E to heroin and hospitalisation.
Okay, the tales are credible. But how about: "Jimmy is 40. He has smoked cannabis regularly since he was a teenager. He rarely uses any other drug. He is levelheaded, kind and intelligent. In fact, he could be your school teacher. Or your father.
