RADIO REVIEW: The EU Working Hours Directive may or may not apply to radio reviewers. One thing's for sure: some of the people we have to listen to, week in, week out, sound like they could benefit from its application to their own workloads.
This is, of course, purely an impressionistic judgment, and the sensible editors at The Irish Times would want me to point out that I have no certain knowledge of any Irish broadcaster who is not in compliance with all relevant employment legislation. So, gentle reader, I await your comments.
In the meantime, let's just say that I worry about poor Brian Carthy, RTÉ's Gaelic games correspondent. Now, I won't hear a word said against him - the roaring clarity and down-home quality of his voice, the breadth of his knowledge - but my Lord, RTÉ do give him a dog of a summer's work, don't they? Has he had a day off since the World Cup finished? It's not that he's ubiquitous, exactly - his appearances are too scattered and low-profile for that - but he's there all the time, isn't he?
Is it any wonder that during last Sunday's All-Ireland Hurling Final (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday), his voice had a certain are-we-there-yet plaintiveness about it? We'll be there tomorrow week, Brian, after the football final. Barring replays, Brian.
It's not just match days, oh no. Last weekend, I had the radio on at some ungodly post-10 p.m. hour on a Saturday night, and there was Carthy, talking up a storm in some radio equivalent of Up for the Match. Not doing some scripted report, mind you, but interviewing and chatting away. It is hardly surprising that his voice was shot by half-time of Sunday afternoon's game, aka the Kilkenny Arts Festival, when he was tasked with interviewing the artists on the touchline.
But Carthy soldiered on, and claimed what was his due. At the final whistle, he took to the air again, now utterly hoarse (after a game that offered much to cheer but maybe not a lot to shout about), and offered a brief testimony to his own recent efforts. In the course of his pre-final travels and travails, he said, he'd secured a commitment from D.J. Carey that, in the event of a Kilkenny win, the first interview on the pitch would belong to him, Carthy, and to him alone. Sure enough, there was D.J., talking the talk in the way they do, to Carthy. If you had the TV on while listening to RTÉ radio (if so, good call), you saw the camera swing searchingly toward D.J., only to find him deep in conversation with a massive, antenna-sprouting headset that was apparently attached to Brian Carthy; the camera lurched sheepishly away, yielding to radio and to Carthy.
The other reason, needless to say, to listen to such finals on radio goes by the name of Michéal Ó Muircheartaigh. The match commentator is, of course, an artist of the airwaves all year round, but on the really big occasions he inches toward genius and/or self-parody, spending half the programme sending greetings out to various missionaries and acquaintances' sisters listening to the match halfway around the world. I often wonder if these listeners are able to make much sense of the rest of the broadcast, since a full comprehension of Micheal's rapid-fire, blow-by-blow delivery does often depend on knowing the names of both teams' players, and sometimes their nicknames to boot.
That's not the only specialist knowledge you might require to decipher the information on offer. "These two teams last met in the final in the year of the Eucharistic Congress," went one classic Micheal tidbit. All-Ireland, how are ya.
One date we're unlikely to forget fell in midweek. Was I the only one to feel that there was a hint of the dry heaves, of too-readily-rehearsed emotions, of too-familiar set-piece arguments, about the whole anniversary thing? As a New York Times article pointed out this week, the September 11th attacks remain a shockingly uninvestigated series of events, from the hijackings themselves to the emergency service response to the military consequences - and, by and large, this week's radio did little to add to the sum of knowledge.
An honourable exception was some of Philip Boucher Hayes's reporting from New York for Five Seven Live (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), especially on Tuesday, when he looked at some forgotten, uncompensated victims of September 11th - poor and immigrant New Yorkers.
Documentary on One: Ruth's Coin (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) was also some improvement on the week's generality, albeit with significant reservations. This was producer/presenter Ronan Kelly's version of the sort of highly detailed, even intrusive obituaries of "ordinary" victims of September 11th that flourished in the media in the weeks and months after last autumn's atrocity. The victim this time was Cork-born Ruth Clifford McCourt, who died with her four-year-old daughter on one of the New York planes. You may recall that her best friend died on the other plane, while her brother, Ron, escaped from one of the towers.
Even before September 11th, 2001, this was something of a horror story. There were the early deaths, the sad separations, the breakdown of marriages - her parents', her own - plus all the indiscreet charms of the Cork and California bourgeoisie to which she simultaneously belonged. The needs of narrative, of course, required that her life took a dramatic turn for the better only in its tragically shortened last few years; nonetheless, the opening quarter-hour or more felt a little rough, exploiting the 9/11 exhibitionism of some of McCourt's US-based friends and relatives to tell tales I'd imagine some Cork people would rather have had left unspoken.
Speaking of 9/11 exhibitionism, there was something a little creepy too, wasn't there, about the travelling roadshow that was in the Peacock a couple of weeks back, in which Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins expiated any guilt gathered in years of left-leaning activism with a staged reading of an emotional tribute to New York firefighters. Anne Nelson's play, The Guys (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday), turned up by special permission on Irish radio for the anniversary, sans the golden couple but with no shortage of slightly sickening self-indulgence.
Basically, The Guys is about a New York writer, Joan (Susan Slott here, rather than Sarandon), whose vicarious experience of 9/11 is validated by no less than the captain of a ladder company. This surviving "hero" rescues her from the New York intellectual's "crisis of marginality" because he needs a writer to help him in eulogising his dead men. After September days attempting to volunteer and hearing "plumbers and carpenters first", she is delighted to get the chance. Is there any need to add that she gets emotionally involved with the stories of the dead guys, but writes wonderful, instant obits all the same? "He was just an ordinary guy, a schmo. If Bill walked into a room, you wouldn't even notice. You can't say that in a eulogy," says fireman Nick of the first dead colleague to whom he must pay tribute. But Nick gets the memory juices flowing, and we learn, again, that no life is "ordinary". This time, though, the life stories are told without the marital breakdowns and assorted other miseries.
The Guys had its moments, including a ring-of-truth opening monologue by Joan and some decent dialogue too - though Daniel Reardon as Nick suffered by comparison with the real-life firemen whose authentic New York voices were on air all week.
But by the time formerly radical Joan completed her "how dare they" rant about the foreigners who insist on seeing 9/11 in the light of global history and the US role in it, we realised this was as self-regarding as George Bush in the UN, and far less consequential.