Radio Review: And the Oscar goes to . . . Adi Roche? Well, she certainly should win something for her report from Hollywood on Monday's Gerry Ryan (weekdays, 2FM).
It was like sending your best friend to a party and getting a funny phone-call from her on the mobile to tell all, midway through the high jinks. Up all night, on her way into the Elton John party, the charismatic Roche told of her delight at Maryann DeLeo's award for her Chernobyl Heart documentary. Her sober spiel on how the award would give her charity, the Chernobyl Children's Project, massive leverage in the US was punctuated with giddy celebrity sightings - "ooh, there's Jude Law" and "look, it's Tim Robbins" - and talk of hanging out with Colin Farrell ("I hope my husband's not listening"). Her sense of fun was infectious. And yes, she was wearing a fabulous dress for the occasion, quite different from what she needs on her more frequent trips to icy Belarus, which involve piling on as many layers as possible. She'd been standing for hours and her Manolos ("borrowed, Gerry," she said cheerfully) were killing her.
Also in the US, for reasons that never quite became clear during the programmes, Tonight With Vincent Browne (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) decamped to New York. Then again, it's a complete mystery to me why we're all supposed to be so interested in the American primaries - the progress of John Kerry et al is a permanent fixture on Irish radio news bulletins, sometimes ahead of Iraq or even Irish news.
Browne was broadcasting all week from a Madison Avenue law office (why?) and at times the sound quality was desperate. US foreign policy dominated Monday's programme and the line-up included Marion McKeone, the savvy Sunday Tribune journalist; Prof Margaret Stock, a lawyer and military academic; and philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky.
The battle lines were too clearly drawn, with Browne, McKeone and Chomsky on one side of the "US is ruling Central America and the Caribbean from behind a façade" debate, versus Stock on the other. She was placed in the lonely role of trying to defend the US's entire foreign policy, as if she was Colin Powell in drag.
It's always entertaining to hear Browne do a Paxman, haranguing our more confused politicians. However, the combative tone he used while challenging (not debating with) the lawyer/academic was in sharp contrast to his approach to Chomsky, who was treated like the oracle. It made the first programme sound hopelessly unbalanced. And get this: Chomsky wasn't even holed up on Madison in front of a dodgy mic, he was on the telephone - which fairly cancels out the point of traipsing across the Atlantic for face time with American intellectuals. By Wednesday the whole format of the programme had broken down hopelessly with re-enactments of the tribunal from Dublin being fed into the mix, followed by news and a long sports bulletin entirely ruining any possibility of Manhattan magic.
A familiar-sounding voice was former Undertone Fergal Sharkey, presenter of Breaking the Barricades? The Story of Ulster Rock (BBC Radio 2, Saturday). The programme tracked the history of popular music in Northern Ireland during the past 40 years, pointing out that while the Troubles inspired dreadful, patronising songs (Boney M's Belfast and Paul McCartney's Give Ireland Back to the Irish), young musicians in the Province itself were making their own music. A teenage Van Morrison was the first to make a big impression (Baby Please Don't Go, with Gloria as the B-side on his Decca single in 1965 - imagine, Gloria is nearly 40 years old) and bands with international appeal, such as Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones, followed. Veteran BBC DJ and hit-maker John Peel recalled hearing the first punk sounds coming out of the North, saying that when Stiff Little Fingers ended a song with "we're going to blow up in your face" it was a different from a nice middle-class Home Counties punk trying to pretend the same anger.
Peel was so enthusiastic about Teenage Kicks by The Undertones that he paid for a professional recording, the only time he has ever done something like that. His wife loved the song and persuaded him.
"When I met them I didn't understand a word they said," Peel said. "They were totally incomprehensible to me."
Equally incomprehensible at this remove is how tens of thousands of young Irishmen can die in the space of four years in a war and the loss be ignored by subsequent generations. An estimated 300,000 Irishmen fought in the first World War in the British Army and, in The Tin Box (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday), Mary Russell explored through interviews with soldiers' children the way the men who did come home stayed silent about it, with usually only a box of mementos as a reminder of the role they played.
"So many died from the houses in a lane off Camden Street that it was nicknamed the Dardanelles, and after Gallipoli there wasn't a house in the Coombe that didn't have black crepe on the knocker," said one soldier's daughter, bringing the story, succinctly, back home.
