This column has occasionally been accused of having all the compassion of, let's say, Australian prime minister John Howard; and all the professional ethics of, oh, maybe an Aussie flying doctor who's off-duty until he reaches international waters. I'm trying to reform - but not yet.
A few months back, I got all warm and gooey here about Fi Glover on Sunday Service (BBC Radio 5 Live, Sunday). For several weeks, she's been bumped up to the somewhat more conspicuous job of presenting Late Night Live (BBC Radio 5 Live, Monday to Thursday), and for a little while there I was afraid I was going to have to recant and get ugly: she didn't sound especially comfortable or on top of the show's highly eclectic news-talk proceedings.
However, this column's uncustomary give-her-just-a-little-more-time approach has paid off. I am again gone very fond of Fi. (By the way, that's pronounced "fee", as in "reason to pay your licence Fi", rather than "fie", as in "Fi! Be thou hence and away from late-night radio!")
In soccer parlance - why not? we're talking about 5 Live here, where they never use one soccer metaphor when three will do - Fi Glover is a player who seems to create time when she gets on the ball. In fact she verges on laconic, doesn't pretend to be interested in everything and often comes up with an idiosyncratic but somehow just-right line of questioning.
She's also got a reasonably cutting way with words. On Tuesday night, when a Liberal Democrat MP kept on about all the support his party would pick up from other parties' divisions and disillusionments, Glover finally cut in: "You're positioning yourself as the wetwipe of political parties".
On Monday, she turned what should have been a disastrous TV-type gimmick into quite a good panel discussion: the programme was broadcast from around the table of one of west Yorkshire's top Indian restaurants and the topic was multiculturalism. (Actually for 10 minutes, she pinned down the chef and the topic was what exactly makes a good curry, and it seemed she turned to the panel for the Big Issue with no little regret.)
Her finest moment of many came after her Tory guest made what he seemed convinced was a rather good point about the importance of immigrants assimilating themselves to the glories of British culture, rather than setting up ethnic ghettos. Without a hint of aggression, Fi quickly conjured up an image of the British colonial elites in India and Africa, and wondered if they were a model of assimilation. TouchΘ. (The Tory was un-touched, un-ironically responding that colonisers and conquerors lived by different standards from mere immigrants. He was of course absolutely correct.)
Anyway, we've been listening to Fi after 10 p.m. as we wait in joyful hope for the return of Vincent Browne. And as we wait similarly for the return of Eamon Dunphy to The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday), we put up this week with Shane Ross occupying that particular hotseat.
I use "hotseat" advisedly, because at one point on Tuesday Ross sounded like he was on a griddle. The occasion of his most exquisite torture was yet another Navan Man sketch about Michael O'Leary, which portrayed the Ryanair chief as a self-loving vulgarian, dishing out expletives about the likes of Mary O'Rourke. Quite funny and pretty harmless, really, but Ross's next guest, by phone, was none other than the Minister herself.
Well, Ross could almost be heard running across the studio to distance himself from the sketch, which was apparently tasteless and unfunny, and he wouldn't blame O'Rourke if she didn't want to come on the programme at all. Now the same Mary surely has the strongest stomach in Ireland (look at the cabinets she's served in), and anyway, she said she hadn't heard the sketch.
Indeed, she seemed to enjoy quizzing Ross about its contents, prolonging his apologetic agonies.
This was nearly as funny as Ross's sports interviews, given the presenter's apparent ignorance of much of the content behind the questions he'd been given to ask. He made the other sometime-bluffing occupants of the same chair, namely our own Myers and O'Toole, sound like - well, like Eamon Dunphy.
Did anyone else reckon that, when Ross was interviewing Paddy Agnew about Jaap Stam's move to Lazio, he kept referring to the Italian club as "Laslo"?
If you think populism sits ill on the accent, attitudes and origins of Shane Ross, then perhaps you're glad you missed Dylan Among the Poets (BBC Radio 3, Tuesday), in which the Beeb's cultural elite deigned to permit an academic lecture on Bob, interspersed with some altogether rocking sounds.
This was a repeat of Christopher Ricks's 60th-birthday tribute first aired in May. "My songs lead their own lives," he quoted Dylan as saying, and in fairness, though he rarely allowed whole songs to live on the radio, Ricks, within the confines of a lecture format, certainly permitted the singer his own voice.
Ricks was speaking, he said, as "a fellow sexagenarian. He quoted Picasso: "One starts to get young at the age of 60, but it's late." Or as Bob himself put it: "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." Ricks got his old-fella complaints about Dylan's noisy live gigs out of the way early, finally admitting: "There's no sense in going to a Dylan concert unless you relish the risk, that you take your ears in your hands."
The most unfortunate thing about this otherwise charming and involving talk was that it had to get to the tiresome point, even if Ricks expressed the old and familiar question with unusual sense and sensibility: "Is Dylan a poet? And is this a question about his achievement - how high to value it? - or about his medium - and what to value it as?"
Ricks was in no doubt about how high to value the achievement: very, very. And he was eloquent about the question of medium: "On the page, a poem controls its timing, there and then. Dylan, a performing artist with a true sense of the performing arts, is necessarily in the business, and the pleasure, of playing his timing against his rhyming.
"The cadences, the voicing, the rhythmical draping and shaping - these are resources that don't, of course, make the song superior to the poem, but do change the hiding places of its power." Mmmm, you said it, Chris. Ricks, good on him, chose two recent Dylan songs to read closely and show off his own lit-crit chops.
First was Not Dark Yet, with its haunting refrain, "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there." As Ricks put it: "Many of the songs issue a penultimatum." With death thus in the air, it seemed natural enough, if slightly undergraduate-essayish, to compare Not Dark Yet to Keats's Ode to a Nightingale; Ricks persuasively and extensively argued that the similarities between the two are more than coincidental.
Sort of like Shane Ross and Jaap Stam.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie