New Year's resolution: trust in the judgment of our betters at RTE. Marian Finucane (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) is obviously a brilliant initiative from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.
Maybe. There are adjustments to be made: for listeners, to a shorter news bulletin and no newspaper review at 9 a.m.; for Marian, to a new phone number and "Good morning" instead of "Good afternoon"; the handover to Pat Kenny at 10 a.m. could be made warmer, more natural - in keeping with a more seamless station. But all in all, Finucane and her team yesterday gave themselves a tough act to follow.
The dream start was a dream topic: the show was dominated by, first, a solid, honest interview with Richard Rock, who talked about being kicked out of Boyzone in its embryonic stages.
He also talked about his later heroin addiction, now behind him. Then there was a more emotional encounter with Richard's father, Dickie.
Perfection. We got gossip, drugs, parenting issues, a star for the older generation of listeners and an extremely credible young voice. Arguably, Marian might have pulled back to contrast the prospects of successful treatment for less affluent addicts but this was "human interest" radio, with its limitations and considerable strengths.
However, RTE Radio 1 won't have done its audience age profile or its street cred any favours with some of its "slack week" programming between Christmas and New Year.
Colm Keane's biographical pop-umentaries, in particular, spent the week falling over each other in a scramble for the position of most uncool. But yes, gentle reader, in your interest and with preening confidence in my unshakable incredible cred, I spent valuable holiday time listened to Keane's mix of old and new programmes interviewing and profiling the Hollies, Lovin' Spoonful, Engelbert Humperdinck and Neil Sedaka.
The latter pair, you would imagine, might be beneficiaries of some of the rock-history revisionism that has seen Sixties white pop at least partially redeemed, what with the canonisation of Burt Bacharach. But listening to the music that peppers Keane's programmes, it's easy to see why that hasn't really happened: Sedaka's succession of hits from the early years of the decade are so rosily moon-June that they still sound like the disease the Beatles came to cure; and Humperdinck's over-inflated songs are more an aerobic-workout tape for tonsils than genuinely emotive romantic ballads.
So, gotta love 'em. The delights of these programmes included, as usual, Keane's deadpan narration, in which number-one hits and drug overdoses are greeted with the same stoical acceptance. My favourite "It was then . . . " last week went something like this: "It was then, while he was recovering from the virus, that Humperdinck discovered his powers as a faith healer." Smack! Nice one, Colm.
Taking their pretensions at face value allows Keane and the listener to enter the worlds of these stars as they see themselves. So in quick succession we learn Humperdinck is "very very proud of" (1) the key change he thought of himself for Release Me, (2) the "sideboards" fashion for facial hair that he maintained against his manager's advice, then magnanimously bestowed on Elvis and Co and (3) the apparent fact that he has more songs on the world's karaoke machines than anyone else. All this in an accent hopelessly mired somewhere between Leicester and Las Vegas.
Humperdinck refers briefly to the "big guys" who creamed off loads of his loadsamoney but he is no more asked to explain why he's second only to Sinatra in the eyes of wise-guys than Sedaka is called to account for nearly killing pop. But Sedaka, in poshed-up Brooklyn tones, speaks volumes: his first hit, Oh Carol, was, he says, an amalgam of what he decided were the common ingredients of all the Billboard number ones around the world at the time. Happy Birthday Sweet 16 arose out of a joke about his capacity to have a hit with Happy Birth- day; ironically, it sails chirpily close to paedophilia, as its narrator celebrates the girl he has watched for years finally reaching the age of consent. ("Tonight's the night I've been dreaming of . . . ")
You sense, with Sedaka, a man working well within his talents. As century's end approaches, the musical snobs will have to come to terms with his likes: as a teenager at the Juilliard, Sedaka was one of New York's most promising classical musicians but he was lured away by the century's most powerful musical idiom, a now-universal language based on African-American rhythms and harmonies - and it sounds something like this: "Down dobe-doo down down . . . "