In his career as a broadcaster and columnist, Brendan O’Connor (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday & Sunday) has been no stranger to quarrels. So, listeners can be forgiven for harbouring high expectations at the prospect of him squaring off against the Terminator. As it turns out, however, O’Connor’s encounter with Arnold Schwarzenegger on Saturday’s show is not so much a showdown with an unstoppable Teutonic destroyer as an empowering self-help session, with the bodybuilder-turned-movie star playing the unlikely role of life coach to the host’s eager fanboy.
O’Connor sets the tone by calling his guest “my new guru”. Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, eschews the action-hero identity honed in his Terminator movies in favour of the puckish comedy side of his less celebrated movies like, ahem, Kindergarten Cop. Noting that his online connection to O’Connor has no visuals, he deadpans: “They’re saying you’ve got a good face for radio.”
Jolly introductions out of the way, Schwarzenegger gets down to business, laying out the ethos that underlines his new book, Be Useful: “I always shoot for the top goal.” When O’Connor wryly remarks, “I probably think small because I don’t want to be disappointed”, his guest insists setbacks can be overcome: “The losers stay down, but the winner always gets up.” Even a botched heart surgery is presented as a life lesson. “I put this under the category of ‘shifting gears’,” he says.
On the face of things, this should be as exciting as a roomful of motivational wall posters. But it’s a captivating conversation, showing off Schwarzenegger’s faintly preposterous public guise – he quotes Nietzsche, natürlich – but also allowing glimpses of his inner self. He talks about growing up with an abusive father, and how it drove his brother – “weaker than I was” – to alcoholism and eventual death in a drunken car crash; in contrast, “the more punishment I got, the stronger I got”.
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It’s an almost cartoonishly Übermensch philosophy, but also revealing. So too is Schwarzenegger’s obvious delight as he recalls weight training with Special Olympics athletes: “That was when I realised the power of giving.” O’Connor, who has previously spoken of his own family members with Down syndrome, is clearly affected: “That’s a beautiful thing.” Of course, the host has other reasons to be happy. His programme is illuminated by Schwarzenegger’s stellar incandescence, a bona fide A-lister that The Late Late Show can only dream of.
It’s not even O’Connor’s best interview that day. Novelist John Boyne appears on the show to discuss his new novella, Water, and the sexual abuse that spurred its writing. Unsurprisingly, a sombre atmosphere prevails as Boyne recounts his experiences as a schoolboy at Terenure College in Dublin, where he was a pupil of English teacher John McClean – later convicted for sexually assaulting 23 students – while Boyne himself was sexually abused by another, recently deceased, teacher, who he only calls “D”.
Boyne talks with raw honesty, recalling how his abuser’s actions deeply affected him as he came to terms with being gay. He describes his “extraordinary amount of rage against the school, the church, the teachers”, to the point that for many years he was unable to write about what happened.
O’Connor, for his part, handles Boyne with sensitivity, while drawing out detail and neatly summarising the story at crucial points: “You couldn’t open that door,” he says of his guest’s particular writer’s block. The host also raises the uncomfortable notion of wider, albeit unwitting, complicity in enabling institutional abuse: “Are there a lot of ordinary, good, decent people in Ireland who didn’t even realise they were looking the other way?” It’s a theme in Boyne addresses when recalling his complicated emotions towards McClean, who had encouraged the student’s literary sensibilities and to whom the writer sent a copy of his debut novel. “This is what we’re talking about,” says the anguished Boyne, “I knew exactly what he had been doing all those years, because all of us did.”
It’s an extraordinarily open and thoughtful conversation, which raises as many knotty issues as it resolves. But it underlines why O’Connor’s weekend shows performs strongly: he is at home with light and shade, from shooting stars to troubling topics.
There’s more uneasy listening courtesy of the Documentary on One: Fear and Mistrust (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday), which charts the emergence of far-right groups in Ireland with dispiriting clarity. It’s cautionary tale – narrator and co-producer Fergal Gallagher sees echoes of Donald Trump’s rise in the surge of Irish right-wing politics – but one that seeks to understand the factors fuelling extremist views, hearing not just from pundits and past adherents, but also committed followers.
The latter voices are most striking. Initially, middle-aged mother Jean sounds like a mainstream conservative. “I want my children growing up in a society with my values as a Catholic,” she says. But with her loss of trust in government during the 2008 crash later supercharged by the trauma of the pandemic, she has turned to conspiracy theories rife in the internet’s darker corners: she describes mask mandates as “submission” and talks of plans to replace the “indigenous” Irish population with migrants, the so-called “great replacement” conspiracy.
Jean’s quiet sincerity is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the programme. Contrasting with the usual hate-filled bombast of far-right figures, yet subscribing to their beliefs, she shows how such views can chime with apparently reasonable people.
It’s another valuable edition of the Doc on One, emphasising the story-driven strand’s adroitness with topical issues: the series also yielded last year’s harrowing Blackrock Boys, which dominated the headlines with its revelations of sexual abuse at the elite Dublin school.
With public trust in RTÉ at an all-time low, the programme restores some confidence in the network, and in the power of facts.
