RadioReview:Small-island syndrome has a habit of smothering some interview shows, but at least Sian O'Gorman, for her new series, Cast a Long Shadow (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday), has - so far - sidestepped the depressingly common "round up the usual suspects" approach to her guest list.
Last week Bobby Rackard talked about his father, hurler Nicky, and this week Mark Ervine talked about his dad, David. In the Ervine case though, it sounded more of a vaguely personal obituary rather than a probing of the impact the terrorist-turned-politician had on his son. There was no real sense of how Mark's life and personality had been influenced by having such a complex father, no laying bare of emotions. There were glimpses, certainly, particularly his description of visiting his father in Long Kesh and the uneasiness he felt as a child when his dad finally came home - "I was the man of the house, not him". But the programme needed a skilled interviewer with some mind-probing skills on the lines of Dr Anthony Clare in his classic BBC series In the Psychiatrist's Chair to really come to grips with the impact a famous parent can have on a child's life and to deliver on the series' title.
If you think the usual suspects remark is a bit on the harsh side, look at the guest list for Conversations with Eamon Dunphy (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday). This week it was Mountjoy Prison governor John Lonergan. Nothing personal or anything, but he's yet another of Dunphy's guests who I've heard being interviewed so often I could take their life stories as my specialist subject on Mastermind.
One new voice this week was Galway writer Julian Gough, who won the National Short Story Prize in Britain. It's an enormously prestigious competition that sees established, even famous, writers including Hanif Kureishi vie for the £15,000 (€22,000) prize - lotto money in the short story world - and Gough sounded giddy and quite the maverick talking to Richard Downes (Morning Ireland, RTÉ Radio 1, Monday). He wrote the story, The Orphan and the Mob, as a sort of afterthought after finishing a novel and found it "bizarre" to be now handed all that loot for it. The judges included Monica Ali - "she's very, very sexy you know," Gough told Downes, who sounded so startled by this turn in a literary interview that he quickly and stiffly added "and she's a very fine writer too". Gough's story was broadcast on Tuesday (National Short Story Prize, BBC Radio 4) and it is, as Gough described, "a tickle and a poke at Irish society". The yarn centres on Jude, an orphan who accidentally urinates on a Fianna Fáil minister, Brunhilde de Valera, while she is unveiling a new national monument - a hole in a bog in Tipperary, the new crucible of the birth of the nation now to be known as "de Valera's hole". The baying mob chases Jude, leading to the burning of the orphanage, and all sorts of surreal shenanigans worthy of Father Ted ensue.
On Friday, two programmes covered the same topic at the same time and their approach showed their different relationship with their listeners. Both The Ray D'Arcy Show (Today FM) and The Tubridy Show (RTÉ Radio 1) looked at the previous evening's launch of a new campaign aimed at making young drivers slow down. D'Arcy's show, which is more in tune with the target audience, and which has campaigned on the issue of road carnage, let the listeners comment -- an insight in itself into the ad's effectiveness, while Tubridy conducted a dry, statistic-laden interview with the maker of the ad.
It's reminiscent of Call My Bluff, but the new comedy programme The Unbelievable Truth (BBC Radio 4, Monday) is worth a listen. The idea is that panellists are encouraged to tell lies and compete to see how many items of truth they are able to smuggle past their opponents. It's not a laugh a minute, but there are enough flashes of humour - plus host David Mitchell's deadpan style - to keep it going. The subject was cats, and we heard that Elizabethan men wore "codpusses" - cats in net hammocks (not true); and that in 19th-century Belgium, cats were employed to deliver mail (weirdly true, though it didn't last long because the cats were hopeless at it). My favourite was "A cat hopping from one foot to another is a sign that your tin roof is too hot" (probably true, but, for the protection of moggies everywhere, not one to try at home).
