Despite the back-to-school shopping, the build-up of traffic, the weather that's autumnal-on-a-good-day, and - not least - the presence of a rather big story out there, the apparent drowning of the Celtic Tiger, some sections of RT╔ insist on seeing this as summer.
On the radio, that means RT╔'s flagship mid-morning programmes on the two big stations, Marian Finucane (Radio 1, Monday to Friday) and Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday), are still saddled with summer presenters, that slackly reactive summer approach to happenings in the world outside, and all the effervescence of a Baltimore Technologies stock-option. And while you couldn't say the same for Today with Pat Kenny (Radio 1, Monday to Friday), which has been back and cracking for most of the month, that still makes two snoozy shows too many. Would-be-enlivening gimmicks are an inevitable part of the summer mix.
On 2FM, the folks responsible for filling the Gerry Ryan slot with Dave Fanning have come up with a Friday formula that plays to Fanning's culture-vulture proclivities, while also helpfully giving him some company in the studio (he just doesn't inhabit it the way Gerry Ryan does): most of each Friday's show is given over to a decade retrospective. Thus yesterday's programme (too late for this column's deadline) was dedicated to the dreaded 1980s, while previous Fridays brought us - you guessed it - the 1960s and 1970s. (Forecasts for next week's show on a postcard, please.)
Both the 1960s and 1970s shows got off to dispiriting starts. First Fanning played a record (no complaints there), then we were dragged into one of those awful audio montages of the relevant decade. You know the sort: maudlin music drips in the background and we hear "Ask not what your country can do for you . . ." fade into "I have a dream" and on to "One small step for man", with the yapping of journalists describing the big events in between.
Those clip-collections (sourced perhaps on some vinyl LP that's been gathering dust in the RT╔ archive) were awful, not just because of their idiotically reductive shorthand - shorthand can come in handy, after all - but because they hear the world from one perspective, American, with one accent, American. They'd be shameful even on US radio; on Irish radio their use looks like the worst sort of laziness. Decades happened here too, you know.
Then both shows picked up considerably, partly because of the life that's regularly breathed down the Ryanline by callers, but mainly because the principal guests were so well chosen: for the cynical 1970s we had arch-cynic George Byrne, who has faith only in Horslips; and for the idealistic 1960s, Fanning was joined by Irish radio's immortal dreamer, BP Fallon.
Fallon lives mainly in New York nowadays and remains a seriously hip DJ, journalist etc, and here he started out doing his best to sound as though talking about the 1960s was a far-away, tiresome irrelevancy. That lasted about 45 seconds. Before long, with the enthusiastic assistance of Fanning, we were there and then.
At one stage Fanning asked a typically round-about, slightly askew question about how deeply into the Summer of Love BP had immersed himself back in 1967, summing up: "peace, love and brown rice?"
BP quickly and coolly amended the description: "peace, love and brown rice and acid". (Not the brown acid, surely?)
Fanning laughed, a little nervously, and asked: "Was it a good trip, Beep?"
"It still is. They said it would only last for eight hours, but it's lasted 400 years, you know."
Such is the ubiquity of soccer, year-round for what feels like the last 400 years that we can't identify the start of the English Premiership season as some sort of harbinger of winter. It does, however, represent a turning of the year for Today FM, which has returned with its Saturday-afternoon live broadcasts from the most over-exposed league in the world.
Now, any Premiership programme that doesn't require us to look at Des Lynam and Ally McCoist must today be regarded as one of the shining stars in the soccer-broadcasting firmament. And Premiership Live (Today FM, Saturday), notwithstanding the disconcerting "help wanted" ad that went out shortly before kick-off, has that and a good bit more going for it.
When the medium-wave reception is good, or I'm attached to an FM cable, I'll still take BBC Radio 5 Live, in spite of the illusion-shattering slick new TV ad that has put ill-fitting faces on its glorious voices. The Tom Tyrell and Mick Martin combination on Today is no match (of the day) for most of that competition - the pair are fine for reading the mood of a game, but less able to convey its underlying substance. But if they're reporting a game you're dying to follow, that probably won't be an insuperable obstacle.
Then again, if they're not reporting on your team, you might do what one of the callers to their post-game phone-in confessed to doing: an Arsenal fan, he listened to 5 Live to hear his team play, before switching back to Today for the phone-in.
In doing so he captured the ridiculousness of an Irish station hosting a phone-in about an overseas league that's not televised live, especially in the opening week of the season. This Arsenal fan, like virtually every other caller on the show (but unlike the callers to the British phone-ins, who are usually on their way home from matches), hadn't actually seen his side play a competitive match yet this season.
It didn't stop him rhapsodising about Arsenal's performance at Middlesbrough, which he kept describing as "cynical" when I'm pretty sure he meant something else, maybe that favoured football clichΘ, "clinical". And Denis Bergkamp, he assured us, was back to his best: "Bergkamp's first goal was brilliant - I'm telling you, you'd want to have heard it".
Ah, the magic of radio - maybe it's not so ridiculous.
You do have my permission to call Test Match Special (BBC Radio 4, Thursday to Monday) "absurd", just so long as you quickly add "sublime" to the description. Again this summer I have found myself spending hours listening to cricket, a game I would never dream of sitting down to watch for any length of time on TV. Call it a cultural experience - one for which Australia demolishing England is not even a necessary condition of pleasure.
Because this week England turned the tables, much to the astonishment of the cricket hacks and talking heads who usually take English self-loathing to such eloquent heights. (One for the archives would be Sunday night's after-play programme on 5 Live, in which English player Mark Butcher was interviewed and, despite his team's mountain to climb, played up England's chances and his own ambitions for the next day's cricket.
When the tape finished, the assembled journos in the studio patronised and pooh-poohed him, with he-would-say-that-wouldn't-he put-downs. Butcher's response on Monday was one of England's greatest batting performances, stroking his side to comfortable victory.)
But the lovely thing about Test Match Special is its international flavour and gentlemanly impartiality (not to mention the digressions about pied wagtails flittering around the Headingley stand). Can you imagine Des Lynam apologising for flag-waving when England manages to beat Germany? Hah! But that's exactly what one of TMS's plummiest voices did on Monday, asking listeners to please forgive him and his colleagues a little audible pleasure at England's success in even this fairly meaningless match against the world's best.
"But I had a lovely note here from a listener in Australia who says not to worry, I'm not biased. That's John, who's a miner in Western Australia, and he says I'm not a biased Pom." Then he saluted the listener like only a true Pom could: "Thank you, John, you're a splendid chap . . ."
hbrowne@irish-times.ie