Radio Review: The first day of the smoking ban presented radio producers with quite a challenge. The threat - or promise - of the ban seems to have been hanging around for so long that most ways of covering the story have been done ad nauseam over the past few months. As a result it was difficult to come up with something a bit different, writes Bernice Harrison.
Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) headed to an early-hours pub in Dublin where, at 7.30 a.m. on Monday, patrons were downing pints and mostly bemoaning the ban, and the barman feared for his job. Today With Pat Kenny (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) had Terry Prone in studio and Michael Healy-Rae on the line.
It's rare but sometimes a pity that with radio there are no visual distractions. So while Healy-Rae aired much the same views on the subject as he did on Questions and Answers on RTÉ television later that evening, at least on television there was the marvellous distraction of his retro West Village chic leather cap. Radio listeners had no such diversion, which made the Co Kerry politician's well-worn whine about the poor publicans all the more trying. Terry Prone showed extraordinary patience in dealing with his points, especially when he said he didn't see any contradiction between being on a health board and opposing the smoking ban.
The funniest coverage was on Gerry Ryan (2FM, weekdays), in which a woman was sent out to a couple of restaurants, the idea being that she would light up and see what the reaction would be. If the programme team were hoping for a tirade of common abuse or even a bit of tray-bashing from her fellow diners, it didn't happen, just ultra-polite staff suggesting that she put it out. By far the most desperate idea (in every sense) came on Five Seven Live (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays), where someone had the brainwave of sending Philip Boucher-Hayes to Paris to see how a smoking ban would go down there. Cue excruciating accordion music and a few breathy bars of Je t'aime and - quelle surprise - our Gallic neighbours don't approve of a ban.
So that should be that then: no more interviews with phlegmy-voiced people who sounded a gasp away from an oxygen tank but still found enough air to bang on about their rights as smokers; no more rubbish from publicans suggesting that if only they were asked they would have installed the same air-filtration system that's on the space shuttle (even though they can't quite manage to put a bar of soap in the Ladies) and no more jaunts to foreign cities to ask daft questions - though with all that difficult-to-fill Easter week airtime approaching, it seems unlikely radio listeners will be entirely smoking-ban-free for too long.
Thursday was April Fool's Day, though listeners who phoned into The Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show (Today FM, weekdays) and Gerry Ryan (2FM, weekdays) clearly hadn't consulted their calendars before getting so hot under the collar. The Dempsey wheeze was that Ronan Collins had won the Lotto, which provoked irate texts and phone calls. Ryan's spoof was much more sophisticated - rust has been discovered on the Spire on O'Connell Street - and contributors included a spokesman from British Steel Erectors (BSE) and "Minister Charlie McCreevy" (whoever he is, he does a fantastic impersonation of the finance minister) saying there was no money to fix the problem. The programme conducted a telephone vote and the majority of callers seemed quite happy to let the monument rust away to nothing.
World Health Day, with its focus on driving safety, was marked on Driving Lesson (BBC World Service, Wednesday), with the programme travelling to Montana in the US. In the early 1990s the speed limit in the state was 55 m.p.h.; now it's 70 m.p.h., and for four years in the mid-1990s there was so speed limit at all. During all that time, there was no appreciable fluctuation in the number of road fatalities, which might raise questions about the point of having a speed limit at all. Drivers, it was suggested, naturally find a speed limit they are comfortable with and stick to it. The presenter took the Montana driving test and passed, though he had been advised that it wasn't exactly difficult ("circle for about four blocks at 25 m.p.h. and if you don't kill anyone, you're good to go"). It sounds like an extraordinary state for driving: empty four-lane highways; 15-year-olds with full licences; and a driving instructor who explained that he has to bring some learners on a three-hour drive before they encounter a traffic light.
For all that, the Interstate was peppered with white crosses indicating road deaths. Over the border in Canada, the record for road safety is better - 30 per cent fewer accidents than Montana - because they have the fundamentals right. There's a graduated licensing system with three levels, the final being a strict driving test which the presenter, an experienced driver, failed. What careful Canadians must make of our learner driver system would make for an interesting programme - in an April Fool kind of way, of course.