Radio Review: Maybe it's because she's a poet that Rita Anne Higgins's media statement (Five Seven Live, RTÉ1 Wednesday), on the murder of her brother was so moving. The simplicity of her language and her quiet delivery shone a piercing light on the suddenness of her family's grief. The death, she said, "is a tragedy that will haunt us for the rest of our lives."
From early morning, radio bulletins had been announcing the bare fact that an Irish man, Anthony Christopher Higgins, had been shot at his workplace in Saudi Arabia. Even then, listeners would have instinctively known that the media, in getting the name right, had gotten it subtly wrong. Every time it was repeated you just knew that somewhere in Ireland, someone was stopped in their tracks by the newsreader, wondering if it could be the Tony Higgins they knew or went to school with or had worked with. Repeating his full name had the cold formality of a gravestone but it also showed plainly how little information there was.
Later in the day, hearing his sister talk of her brother's wife and children and her request that the family be "allowed the dignity to grieve", truly brought the story home.
That programme's regular reporter, Fergal Keane, whose reports from Iraq are usually only minutes long, was given a bank holiday, hour-long slot for a documentary, Strangers in a Strange Land, (RTÉ1) Monday. Despite the jarringly romantic title it was a war story - Keane was a guest of an American platoon on active duty in Iraq.
There was no doubt that it was an embedded situation - and the whole issue of embedded journalists makes many uneasy. Sitting in the Humvee, about to go on patrol, his opening question to the soldier in command was: "So what are we aiming to do?" There were fascinating vignettes: the medic who disagreed with everything about the war but was motivated only by a bond of brotherhood with his fellow soldiers; the Iraqi woman who works for the Americans as a translator for €600 a month, enough to support her large family but with an additional price tag of the hatred of her neighbours; and the soldier whose naked disgust at and complete lack of understanding of the Iraqi people were in every bitter sentence. People who live like they do, he figured, in shacks with barefoot children, don't deserve democracy "to be just handed to them". But the documentary was over-long, with too much talk about military hardware, and repetitous interviews with soldiers - at half the length it would have been gripping from beginning to end.
There wasn't a spare second in Kay Sheehy's new series A Piece of Me (RTÉ1, Tuesday). Each week she's going to focus on a part of the body and in the first programme it was the tongue - it didn't read like a promising idea but Sheehy has a quirky sense of humour and a hardworking, lateral approach that made for a highly entertaining programme. Thoroughly disgusting medical facts were dished up by Dr Steven Murphy - we produce 10,000 gallons of saliva in a lifetime - and these were interspersed by daft songs including Waylon Jennings's (Get your tongue out of my mouth, I'm) kissing you goodbye.
A speech therapist explained tongue twisters and Sheehy explored the old trick of eating an apple while smelling an onion to fool the brain into thinking the opposite is happening. Artist Dorothy Cross fingering a little pile of defrosted lambs' tongues and talking about the necklace she made out of them was weirdly compelling.
This column never comments on advertisements because, let's face it, once the rant began it might never stop. However, because it's connected to the subject at hand, the current campaign for the TV and radio licence fee - made by RTÉ itself - is fair game.
The "creative" idea behind the advertisements is that the shame of being up in court for non-payment of the licence is enough to make your girlfriend drop you (the shockingly stupid TV ad) or, in the equally risible radio ad, for a father to write a son out of the will.
This nonsense was heard for the first time this week between programmes that were wall-to-wall with corporate types, from telecoms to banking, blithely admitting to overcharging - another word for stealing, incidentally - without the barest blush. So to suggest that someone should feel shame about not having a licence is simply ludicrous - shame does not seem to be part of the, ahem, culture.
Why not have the confidence to go all out for a "because I'm worth it" approach on the basis of the good public service we are getting from the licence fee - at least on radio anyway.
