I like a good intellectual chat, I do. But I was surprised all the same to hear the energy with which Rodney Rice flagged a segment of Tuesday's After Dark (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday to Thursday) as though it were going to be a postgraduate seminar. Pretty intimidating, no?
But hey, Rodney must know his listeners, and if the conversation about wealth and freedom turned out to be mostly more sophomoric than doctoral, it suited me pretty well all the same and should earn some extra credit.
The occasion was an upcoming lecture by Oxbridge academic, Gerry Cohen, with a promising title along the lines of If You're Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? Cohen, by phone, and politically diverse studio guests discussed the topic. Cohen seems to be attempting to relocate questions of inequality away from the structural realm and into that of personal morality (from Marxist to Christian, Rice explained) and the prospects for debate didn't sound good when NUI Maynooth sociologist Mary Corcoran quickly agreed that Marxism was "old hat" (a term with some specific sociological meaning, no doubt). But she, Cohen and Oliver O'Connor were soon mixing it well. Cohen was very sparing with any Christian charity - his dissection of the conflation of capitalism and freedom was especially refreshing. Lack of money, he argued - incontrovertibly, to these ears - is lack of freedom.
Ah, political debate. America's quadrennial quest for the least-worst is reaching its climax, and for an ex-pat like myself there's an unmistakable longing. No, not for the US political system, God help 'em, but for the speculation, electoral vote-counting and pure political tetchiness that accompanies a close presidential race like this one. They're not the sort of thing that translates into good radio for international audiences, and the relatively low-key presence of the US election on our airwaves up until this week is completely understandable. The candidates, Tweedledum and Tweedlesmart, have each adopted a whatever-you-say-say-nothing strategy, and there's absolutely no reason for us to listen.
But I did go looking for a fix on the US National Public Radio news, which Dubliners can hear via the FM cable on the World Radio Network. So I heard the NPR journalists struggling over the exegesis of "Shrub" Bush's statements on new patients' rights legislation. Basically, there are two quite different bills in Washington, one of which will become law. Which does Tweedledum support? I listened closely to Bush making his statement, but emerged from the ordeal none the wiser.
Then came Shrub's spokesman explaining the candidate's extraordinary vagueness. "He doesn't want to get locked into that sort of `Inside the Beltway' politics." You'd wonder why he's running for president, so. Radio, in addition to being a key forum in this election, is also something of a political issue, though you wouldn't know it to hear the Dynasty twins. (Old Al Senior concedes nothing to George Senior in the potentate stakes.)
And sadly, National Public Radio is one of the bad guys, joining with the big commercial players to oppose a rare positive move from the Federal Communications Commission: the FCC wants to expand low-power FM stations (with ranges from neighbourhood to small city) as community radio outlets. The National Association of Broadcasters got its friends in Congress to try to shoot down the move by legislative sleight of hand, and local radio, of the community variety, remains poorer for it. Then there's commercial, very commercial, local radio. This column suggested last spring that Lite FM, the new over-35 music station in Dublin, was definitely on to a winner. Now I haven't had a helluva lot to say about it since, for the simple reason that its narrow, if largely inoffensive, MOR music mix ain't my thing. In my musiccraving evening hours, there are easily a half-dozen preferable stops on the dial.
But I'm just the Hack. The Taxi-Driver and the Shopkeeper convinced me early on that I was atypical. And the interim JNLR/MRBI figures released last week reveal that the Housewife (their word) is turning on the Lite. Yes, Lite FM is already hammering Today FM in the housewife and 35-to-54 age categories - "beyond our wildest expectations", says chief executive Martin Block.
"Wild expectations" and Lite FM might not be the closest fit, but there's no point in being snobby about what most people want from radio and about the stations that deliver it most successfully. Radio can be many things, but "a business" is definitely top of the list. If Lite FM isn't going to win any innovation awards, the same can't be said for Mooney Goes Wild on One (RTE Radio 1, Sunday), which scooped a Prix Europa the other week for prying into the private lives of a pair of jackdaws. Last spring's Nestwatch 2000 used the expertise of Mooney's birdman Richard Collins to great effect as it followed the efforts of Jackie and Daw to prepare and provide for their young 'uns. Also taking up the opportunities that new media provide, the programmes were models of involving nature broadcasting, and no doubt deserved to hammer all the continental competition. You know, I think Mooney even gets pretty good ratings . . .
There's commercial, then there's the road-safety "ads" that ran in the run-up to the Bank Holiday. Brought to us by the National Safety Council and the National Roads Authority, and produced by Pat Hannon, these two-minute spots brought some of the shock tactics familiar from the genre on television to the more considered form of the audio format.
What was really familiar here were the monologues, of the sort we've heard on countless talk shows: each ad brought us one voice's story, from a young man in a wheelchair to the mother of a girl who was killed in a crash and a gruesome eyewitness account of head injuries in intensive care. The insidious Moby music in the background lent further atmosphere but also a certain Halloween-horror distancing, hardly what was required (though without it, the effect might have been simply devastating). Will this slow down the boy racers? Somehow, the final message - turn on your headlights during the day for the Bank Holiday to Show You Care - provided the unwanted answer to that question: some hope.
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie