RADIO REVIEW:
Sometimes the real world, as it
is represented on the radio, can be too divisive, too repetitive,
too depressing, too much said with too little time, and too darn
sad. And that's without the head-wrecking benefit of jingles and
relentless advertisements urging us to buy more loot we really
don't want or need, writes
Quentin Fottrell.
The radio can be great company. It breathes life into my kitchen and has been part of the rhythm of life since my schooldays. Last year, my neighbours sat on our terrace in the brief sunshine of May with their deckchairs, chattering about the Mountjoy Prison mobile phone scandal on Liveline. Radio can be a powerful, invisible, unifying force too.
Mornings wouldn't be the same without the music of, say, Marian Finucane competing with the expellair as I turn over the rashers, or the tunes to nurse your hangover by on The Ray D'Arcy Show, with its lighter, happier view of the world. (Disclosure: I contribute on a weekly basis to the latter.) I believe in the quality-of-life added value of both.
When Joe Duffy covered the Roebuck Centre affair last year, which broke in this newspaper, I didn't miss a word. With a volatile buckaroo of a story to grab hold of, and not stirred up out of nowhere, Duffy can manage his reluctant, squirming players with delicious, delicate precision. And the dead silences after their zingers are a killer.
I needed respite from the drinking-and-driving analysis on Wednesday's The Last Word (Today FM, Mon-Fri) and clips of 9/11 calls in a montage on Monday's The Tubridy Show (RTÉ Radio 1, Mon-Fri). They didn't need background music. But the magnificent Eileen Walsh, who stars in Eden, was on Thursday's Tubridy and all was forgiven.
Journalist Áine Hegarty was also great gas on Wednesday's Lunchtime With Eamon Keane (Newstalk 106-108, Mon-Fri) on St Patrick's Day political junkets, giving us an image of Brian Cowen drinking cocktails on a beach in Malaysia. I imagine him in a straw sunhat, Jackie O sunglasses, multi-coloured Bermuda shorts and blue flip-flops.
I also dipped into Niall O'Dowd and Stephen King on Wednesday's Today With Pat Kenny (RTÉ Radio 1, Mon-Fri) talking about whether Hillary Clinton over-egged her role in Northern Ireland. Was Hillary a Lady Macbeth during her seven trips there? Or is that like saying Laura Bush could have struck a trade deal with Vladimir Putin in Moscow? King said she claims a part in forcing Bill's hand in bombing Serbia and getting involved in Rwanda. Does Hillary trump Barack Obama and John McCain on foreign policy?
O'Dowd: "Obama or McCain almost have no experience." King: "I accept that entirely." And, today, Matthew, I'm going to be Pat Kenny and say, I think we'll leave it there.
Anyway, after that impossibly long preamble, where the real world wasn't so bad after all, I turned in to Night After Night (BBC Radio 4, Sunday) in the A Brush With Fame series of plays. I missed the first three and there's one left tomorrow, but the good news is that they're currently available online.
Clare Wigfall's monologue was delivered in a beautifully judged postwar cockney by Tracy-Ann Oberman. It's only 15 minutes long, but every one of them is rich in the detail of this fateful day of a mundane marriage, when her world irreversibly turns.
It all comes to a brutal halt for Joyce Turbridge, with the police at her door, looking for her husband Stan. Joyce is a comical, insightful soul, and we are inside her head for this entire day. "I was peeling potatoes for our tea when I caught the blue light sweeping across the kitchen window," she says of the coppers in her courtyard.
Stan was taken off for questioning, so Joyce put his dinner in the oven. But he didn't come home. The next morning, she opens her front door to pick up the milk bottles, only to be greeted by a horde of flashbulbs. " 'Mrs Turbridge,' they was callin' out. 'Mrs Turbridge. Have you anything to say about your husband's arrest?' "
She goes to the police station and is told about her husband's crime. She throws up her tea, doesn't see him, walks outside and is greeted by an old poster of Mae West from Night After Night, which she had once gone to see with Stan. She thought Mae was saying, "Chin up darlin', you'll be all right, we both fell in love with the wrong sort."
"It was like she was looking righ' at me," Joyce says. "Eyelids painted with eye make-up, her painted mouth not quite smiling, the stream of cigarette smoke curling up past the blond waves of her hair." She goes to the movies and dreams, and when she faces the flashbulbs on her return home she imagines she is a jewel-encrusted movie star.
This time, Joyce doesn't hold her head in shame: " 'I'm ever so sorry,' I told the reporters, 'but I don't have nothin' to say.' "
Behind her door the illusion fades. We don't discover Stan's crime. But she chucks out the brown sauce he loved. She regains her strength until, that is, she finds his cold plate of dinner in the oven.