Radio Review: 'Nun with a gun" and "it's nicer to be neutered" - two happily unrelated but memorable expressions heard on radio this week. The "nun" is Kathleen O'Toole, the Boston police commissioner rumoured at the start of the week to have been offered the job of chief of the Garda Inspectorate.
Once it was announced that she had in fact decided to take up the position, the Boston Globe's Kevin Cullen (Morning Ireland, RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) explained that on her home turf she's earned the nickname because she's a rather serious, sober type - not, let's face it, exactly a bad thing in a police commissioner. As every persecuted schoolchild knows, nicknames can Velcro themselves to a person for life, so expect "nun with a gun" to follow O'Toole all the way across the Atlantic.
As for "it's nicer to be neutered", it's the cheesy tag-line of an advertisement for getting your dog seen to - though, heaven knows, the way things are going it could be for the local vasectomy clinic. Several readers emailed to say that in my round-up of those medical conditions we're getting a little bit too much information about, I missed out on a particularly gruesome advertisement for a thrush-fixing product. So at the risk of sounding like an old-school, unarmed nun I think we've had quite enough off these type of ads, thank you.
There were none of your fancy, digitally re-mastered recordings on The Man Who Was Jiminy Cricket (Lyric FM, Sunday), with presenter Stephen Dixon playing Cliff Edwards's original 1930s recording with all their atmospheric hisses and crackles.
In a new four-part series, Dixon is charting some of the more esoteric musical phenomena of the 20th century. He began with someone who everyone has heard of but few could name. Edwards or "Ukulele Ike" was a vaudeville star who in the 1920s was selling 74 million records and earning a massive $4,000 per week. Say It's Only a Paper Moon and Singing in the Rain were his, but by the 1940s vaudeville was in decline and Edwards was just about washed up. Luckily, Walt Disney decided he would be the perfect voice for Pinocchio's sidekick, Jiminy Cricket, and his When You Wish Upon a Star is an all-time classic. This halted but didn't stop Edwards's decline and he died in alcoholic obscurity in a charity home in 1972.
This was a fascinating programme that got the balance perfectly right between appealing to vaudeville specialists and those of us who could hum the tune but couldn't name the singer.
Brendan Behan, another creative genius who met an alcoholic end, was celebrated in Twenty Minutes (BBC Radio 3, Saturday). It's 50 years since The Quare Fellow was first staged by Joan Littlewood in London and, at this distance and as portrayed in this programme, he sounded like a nightmare. Littlewood indulged his antics, which included swaggering up and down the aisles during performances and shouting the odd aside. Through interviews with Declan Kiberd and Ulick O'Connor, presenter Marie-Louise Muir showed how carefully Behan cultivated the image of a working-class drunken Irish writer, creating a caricature of himself.
Television made him a star. Malcolm Muggeridge, the biggest interviewer of the day, couldn't get a sensible word out of him and, remembering that drunks who are too far gone to talk can usually sing, asked Behan for a song. It was a memorable performance that shot Behan into the headlines and he was to perform the same trick, with the same publicity-grabbing effect, on the Ed Sullivan Show later in the US.
At the start of his series, Pimp My Life (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday), Richie Beirne put himself forward as a slacker with a midlife crisis in search of a career, an idea which had great promise, except that he committed the sort of mistake Behan would never do: he forgot to stay in character. So while we were expected to root for him as he tried out various dream-fulfilling careers on Tuesday nights, midway through the series he could be heard presenting Family Flavours, a food programme on the same station on Sundays. His so-called job quest ended this week with him trying out as a stand-up comedian, of which the kindest thing that can be said is that he's better sticking to the cookbooks.
Sad, scratchy songs of the 1920s cropped up again in The Tuesday Play: Seven Deadly Sins (RTÉ Radio 1), my only must-listen of the past few weeks. Asked to choose which of the sins to tackle, Jennifer Johnston chose greed, and the sweetly melancholic monologue performed by Ingrid Craigie was a gem. Afterwards, the continuity announcer - such an old-fashioned concept - cheerfully announced that next week's drama would be by "Enda" O'Brien. Hopefully her sin isn't pride, or else it would be severely dinted.
