Last Saturday I was fully prepared to be more embarrassed than usual by the radio-review column - the bit of it describing how Denis O'Brien as an employer at 98FM doesn't afford his workers the paternity leave that he took as his due from the Moriarty tribunal.
The embarrassment, I thought, would be inflicted thanks to the long lead time of a weekly column: I'd checked out 98FM's dad-unfriendly policy early in the week, but surely by Saturday I'd be trailing behind a media pack hunting for stories while waiting for O'Brien's return to Dublin Castle. After all, if you're to believe the O'Brien camp, represented by his own dad on Liveline (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), there's a whole newspaper group out there with an "agenda" against him.
Well, unless I missed something, the agenda overlooked that particular item last week. And while I'm not surprised that 98FM didn't stick the article on its press-cuttings noticeboard, it has remained a strikingly little-repeated story elsewhere, Sunday Tribune aside.
Are employment practices a tad taboo in Celtic Tigerland? Or has the workplace got some sort of moral immunity in the media? "Hard-hitting" business journalism is flourishing, and is often prepared to be personal and vitriolic about company directors over their companies' share performance. And newspapers this week were happy to inquire about the O'Briens' personal life and the movements of their private jet. However, generally speaking bosses' most direct effect on other people's quality of life is as employers; surely they can be held more responsible for conditions of employment than they can for share prices? Yet even if a journalist does ask "what is Denis O'Brien like to work for?", the published answer is far more likely to feature anecdotes about his mannerisms and personal style than an assessment of his industrial relations attitude and its effect on workers.
Mind you, his mannerisms and personal style are pretty funny. That's judging by Joe Taylor's remarkable impersonation on After Dark (RT╔ Radio 1, Tuesday to Thursday). It's ironic that O'Brien's recent posturing has been in his role as husband and father, because here he sounds like a put-upon, sitcom kid: not so much Denis the Menace as Malcolm in the Middle.
At one stage he complained that perhaps the tribunal would want to check out the bank account he opened in Rathgar when he was 12. Then he insisted he was "being very serious" and defensively declared "I'm listening" in that petulant yeah-right-Dad sort of way. When the questioning suggested that the house in Spain had become a "big issue" last month, he interrupted: "It tidn't become a big issue..." with Taylor carefully catching the careless "tidn't" (assuming Taylor didn't just uncharacteristically stumble). And O'Brien seemed to get right-childishly righteous about barrister John Coughlan allegedly playing to the public gallery: "He's done it three or four times! It's as if he wants to show everybody there's some big deal here!"
And in the one night, the amazing Joe Taylor can move from this southside pre-pubescent O'Brien to an ageing Meath-man, builder Tom Brennan, doing what Justice Flood described as "shadow-boxing" in the castle's other floor-show. Bravo Joe!
That other radio Meath-man was no match, though Navan Man did his damnedest on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday). Denis O'Navan's tribunal appearances were constantly interrupted by his barrister, Ian McBarnacle, who insisted that the most obvious and innocuous questions were "unfair and oppressive" and, indeed, "oppressive and unfair".
Amusing, but no match for Ruair∅ Quinn on the same programme. In the course of a quite unrelated conversation, Quinn came up with perhaps the most bizarre image yet of the potential benefits of EU expansion: "...so we can have Romanian dot.com millionaires in Bucharest rather than Romanian beggars on the streets of Dublin." Such a touchingly senseless sentiment, in both its halves: the dot.com millionaire is already a figure of 1990s' nostalgia, and even the most Euro-enthusiastic would scarcely suggest that the EU has rid the world's streets of, let's say, Irish beggars.
Fair dues to The Last Word for bringing it out of him. The programme does less well, though, when it simply reprises a debate from Morning Ireland (RT╔ Radio, Monday to Friday) or the News at One (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday to Friday). It's not necessarily a bad plan: use a tested formula for conflict, assume most listeners haven't heard the earlier version, tease out the arguments in new ways based on what you were shouting at the radio when you listened to the same cast of characters earlier in the day. Perhaps it's only radio reviewers in search of creativity who are really likely to grouse.
Anyway, early in the week, for example, The Last Word brought us a re-run of the IBEC v IFA debate on compensation for farmers facing compulsory purchase orders when new roads are being built. It's not a row that gets me wildly worked up, except that in its Morning Ireland incarnation the IBEC guy came out with a line that had me in stitches.
Farmers had been doing right well out of land sales lately, he said. In fact, one of them had just lately made a multi-million-pound "windfall profit" selling-up for development in north Co Dublin. The hilarious thing was that the IBEC spokesman said "windfall profit" like it was a really dirty and unjust thing. No, really, a windfall profit? That's just so wrong!
Or maybe it's just the conjunction of "farmer" and "windfall profit" that generated an IBEC sense of outrage. And really, what else can you feel about someone who gives up a piece of land, maybe farmed by a family for generations, in order, perhaps for the first time in all those generations, to make some serious money?
Whereas even our very own Labour Party leader apparently loves some windfall profits - sure, what else but a windfall makes a dot.com millionaire, Romanian or otherwise? And what about Esat? The ratio of hard-labour to cash pocketed by Denis O'Brien looks mighty low compared with your average potato farmer, but it's only recently that the cold breeze of media scepticism has been blowing in the direction of this particular windfaller.
There's blowing, then there's John Coltrane, the subject of Modern Jazz Classics (BBC Radio 2, Tuesday). Branford Marsalis, whose big brother Wynton could be seen spouting a fair amount of old cobblers on the Jazz TV series in recent weeks, takes a surprisingly solid and sophisticated (for Radio 2) approach to the music in his radio programme, and this week's show on fellow saxophonist Coltrane's Giant Steps album surpassed the TV show in at least two ways: First, it risked being technical about jazz while eschewing meaningless hyperbole and second, it let the music do most of the talking.
Plus, it had Coltrane himself rapping about his ideas, in a 1959 Swedish radio interview. So what's with all the notes, John? "There are some set things that I know, some harmonic devices that will take me out of the ordinary path, you see, if I use these.
"But I haven't played them enough and I'm not familiar with them enough yet to take the one single line through them, so I play all of them, you know, trying to acclimate my ears." Then, in a much more recent interview, there was alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett, who has been trying to play Giant Steps for years.
"I'm looking for this freedom in this song. Even though I know how it's built, and I can spell it out technically for you, but it's something that I'm hearing in my head that I have to get to. And that's really what the fascination is about this song for me: that I can't play it yet!" And the intelligence, the humanity, the curiosity, the modesty, the admission of uncertainty, the big, big jazzy laugh out of him would make you think, hey, maybe it's time to take a break from current-affairs radio - where, whatever else you hear, it won't be any of these lovely things.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie