Radio Review: Given that George Hook's other job is as a rugby commentator and this was his first radio show since the nail-biting Ireland/Australia World Cup game, I tuned into The Right Hook (Newstalk 106FM, Monday) expecting an overdose of Hooky-to-Popey-to-Wardy rugger-type chat, writes Bernice Harrison.
But instead, Hook, as usual, was all empathetic banter across a broad range of subjects with a good line-up of guests.
Finance journalist Jill Kerby and Michael Culloty, from the Money Advice and Budgeting Service (MABS), discussed our growing personal debt. Fifteen years ago the typical customer of MABS was someone in receipt of social welfare or in trouble with moneylenders. Now it's just as likely to be a middle-class person with out-of-control credit card debts and the MABS client base has grown by 17 per cent year on year.
"All of us at some point in our lives have been in difficulty, cringing when the post comes," says Hook, showing a chink in his gruff armour.
Later he had John McCririck, Channel 4's racing pundit on with Johnny Murtagh to talk about the tragic deaths of jockey Seán Cleary last weekend and Kieran Kelly in August. Horseracing and motor racing are the only sports that are followed around the track by an ambulance, said Murtagh, adding that he was lucky that he has never broken a bone. Both agreed that horseracing had come on in terms of safety but it was still dangerous.
"You can't think about it, you just have to get on with it," said Murtagh.
By the middle of Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1) on Tuesday, Joe Duffy sounded sorry he'd bothered with a programme devoted to the smoking ban simply because it became clearer with every minute that there wasn't anything new to be said. It had probably sounded like a good idea because the prize guest was Dr Jeffrey Wigand. He's the tobacco industry whistleblower on whom the film The Insider was based. If you thought Russell Crowe, who played him in the movie, was dour and cross, he was a giddy chatterbox by comparison with the hardline, brook-no-argument Wigand. The pro-ban lobby has already aired all his points, so he didn't say anything particularly new.
For balance, there was the usual round up of callers going on about the nanny state and extractor fans. One caller asked Wigand would he begrudge a soldier in Iraq "an auld smoke." It was that sort of debate. To make matters worse Wigand was on a distant-sounding telephone line from America, so even from a technical point of view it made for hard listening.
Then at the end came a classic Liveline moment: a phone call to end all argument. Michael was calling from a ward in James's Hospital. He sounded about 70 with a weak, clogged-up voice and he had to take off an oxygen mask to make the call. The hissing sound of compressed air was an eerie sound effect. The five other men in the ward were the same, he said, all on oxygen from smoking.
He's been there eight days and he had seen the look on the faces of his father, sisters, wife and children standing around the bed, so that's it, he doesn't want to hurt them like that anymore and he's never smoking again. He doesn't know when he's getting out, he's waiting on tests. "How old are you Michael?" asked Joe. "Fifty-seven," said Michael, saying it all.
On Wednesday, RTÉ Radio 1 provided a rare chance to hear The Latecomers, as much an exploration of sound as it was a straightforward documentary. It was produced by Glenn Gould, who is more famous on this side of the Atlantic as a pianist, but was well-known at home in Canada as a television and radio producer.
The 1969 documentary looked at the changing way of life in Newfoundland, and the voices, some of them distinctly Irish, battled at times to be heard above the crashing waves that Gould mixed under the tales of hard work, duty and zeal. The self-sufficient lifestyle was dying out, and younger people wanted more than, as one woman said, "months on end of fog and rain and playing bridge every night".
One man commented that the young people went off to university and came back "with a BA - that's the two first letters of the alphabet and they got 'em backwards". At times the voices were layered on top of each other so that only snatches of words could be heard, sounding like a Greek chorus marking and regretting the passing of a harsh but less complicated style of island living.