Sean O'Rourke mostly does an unimpeachable job at achieving an all-important air of impartiality in his presentation of the News at One (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday to Friday). However, there's one contentious subject about which he's very much on the record, albeit largely via actions rather than words, and that is "the family".
A year or so ago, you could have opened the pages of this newspaper's Education and Living supplement and seen proudly laid out before you the O'Rourke multitudes, accompanied by Sean's own happy testimony. Sean and his wife apparently like "the family" so much that they've had enough offspring to provide a spare family for holiday cover.
Now, lo and behold, Sean O'Rourke has managed to get himself a wee documentary series on the very subject of the "modern Irish family". And his approach displays the same fecundity that characterises his domestic efforts: Ties That Bind (RT╔ Radio 1, Tuesday) will feature no fewer than 10 half-hour programmes between now and the silly season. It's an epic approach to the subject that makes Roddy Doyle's Family look like a throw-away.
It would be reasonable, then, to expect Big Statement Radio from such progeny. If anything like that emerges, however, it will be by increments that are unrecognisable from this week's episode one, which was supposedly about marriage. This trotted along tritely, to a middle-of-the-road soundtrack, like an "and finally" item from News at One - sliding amiably in the first five minutes from the sexist best-man joke to the bridal dressmaker to the priest to the shrink.
Historical perspective? Sure, if you count history as starting in the 1950s. You already know the scΘal, in which all marriages break down into two distinct socio-cultural categories: 1) like our parents had and 2) with our modern busy lifestyles.
It was the one from the bridal shop who got the first crack at the clichΘ about how "marriage is definitely not going out of fashion", but she would say that, and emphatically, wouldn't she? Twenty-five minutes later, O'Rourke did eventually get around to citing, glumly, a statistic about a "quarter of our children born outside of marriage"; evidently this programme was in the can before that figure was revised significantly upward this week. There was no suggestion that this quarter-or-more of babies ("our children", the proprietory pronoun lending propagandistic power) are of interest beyond that almost-audible shake of Sean's head, as evidence that we've "exchanged church values for the values of the high street".
Frankly, and notwithstanding the presence of bigwig Anne Marie O'Callaghan as producer, this was a mess of a programme. Listen, if you dare, to a likeable light-hearted journalist like Fiona Looney being dressed up as a "writer and social observer" in order for her to spout pub-chat about how women were always in control of marriages really, weren't they? (The only difference nowadays, Fiona sez, is that communication between spouses is "more verbiose".)
O'Rourke did interview a long-married couple, Eoin and Claire, who have been through trouble, strife and a lot more besides, but the glib 'n' glitzy context (extended extracts from Joe O'Connor, for Jayzus sake!) did their honesty a disservice. One can only presume that further marital stories in the series won't have the same happy ending as theirs, and of course a 10-parter deserves another chance. So maybe some of you would listen for me next Tuesday and send your comments by e-mail. Please?
Following Anne Doyle's bizarre spell filling-in for Marian Finucane, Ties That Bind conjures up an undoubtedly-false image of RT╔ Bigfeet stalking through the radio centre demanding airtime for themselves and their pet projects. If this is the backlash after a period in which radio management obsessed about "new talent", then it's the Radio One listeners who are feeling the sting.
NOT that the alternatives are always apparent. For myself, I'd love to hear Mary Owens from Connemara Community Radio filling in for Marian, presenting a 10-part documentary series, reading her shopping list, whatever.
I'm particularly suggestable on the subject of Connemara because I've just finished serving on a panel of judges listening to programmes produced by local stations around the State under the New Adventures in Broadcasting scheme. This is a scheme by which independent stations, mainly commercial ones, get a much-needed financial inducement from the Independent Radio and Television Commission (IRTC) to produce some quality radio, especially documentaries, dramas, educational and youth programmes and the like.
You can't of course judge a station and its output by the sort of stuff it does at these subsidised margins of its programming. I definitely don't get out of Dublin enough, but the forays are sufficient to assure me that, for example, South East Radio is not normally characterised by moving documentaries like Forgotten People (described in this column recently) or by an entertaining and technically superb series of nature programmes such as its Wild Ireland. (It's not just their ambition that makes these competition programmes special; frankly, most of the programmes I heard weren't all that good, but one probably shouldn't hold the unsuccessful effort against the offending stations either.)
Connemara, you feel, is a different kettle of fish. Being a community station (and so a haven for radio-loving volunteers rather than profit-seeking Country & Irish playlists), it seems to make the likes of New Adventures in Broadcasting central to its ethos and approach. It boasts an open and accessible process by which all sorts of people get to make programmes under its auspices. And what's more, it keeps winning IRTC prizes, as it did again yesterday for an extraordinary range of programming, including drama and documentary, described as its "Third Millennium Series".
And it has Mary Owens, whose accent is no more Connemara than my own, but who has contributed powerfully to community-based programming there all the same. Her own on-air contribution to the "Third Millennium" thingy was a somewhat slight but always engaging documentary about a local woman's hunt for information on her ancestors, Rooting for Sean Seasta. Put together more-than-competently, for me it soared whenever Owens's own intimate, innocent-yet-sly near-whisper came through the speakers.
And Connemara's voluntary cadre made other, better programmes besides with its IRTC money, notably The Raineys of the Road, about a great family of Traveller musicians, and That Goldmine in the South of Galway Bay, about the history of the Clarinbridge oyster fishery, maintained while others around Ireland were fished out because Clarinbridge was under community control. (You don't think it sounds like a rockin' subject? You'd be surprised.)
Tell ya what. RT╔ Radio One is into star vehicles; Connemara Community Radio is into training ordinary folk in a range of broadcast skills. How about an RT╔ summer camp in Galway, so that before Charlie Bird goes back to Liveline and Vincent Browne sits in for Maxi on Risin' Time, they've actually learned how to do it properly? I'm sure Connemara would let Sean O'Rourke bring his family.