Correction and clarification: last week's radio column may have given a misleading impression of the musical output of the new Dublin commercial station for over-35s, Lite FM. Words such as "tasty" and "educated" may have suggested an intelligent selection of sophisticated songs. Lite FM is in fact wall-to-wall pre-programmed schlock. The error arose due to insufficient information.
In a week when on Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday), the esteemed presenter pithily summarised the content of present-day current affairs broadcasting - "We wallow in the slime of Irish public life" - your columnist did you the service of wallowing in the slime of Lite FM, and discovered in the process that last week's test transmission and the little sample CD the station distributed to the media didn't necessarily capture the ultra-Lite flavour. Actually, "slime", while it's a perfect description of public life, is a bit messy for Lite FM, which is more well-oiled than wallowingly slimey. "Research-led", the phrase which beamed from Lite's submissions to the Independent Radio and Television Commission (IRTC), reveals its true meaning: the station could be broadcast by a computer.
And while the computer is managed by some seasoned and accomplished Irish people - mostly notably programme director and presenter Scott Williams, along with presenters such as Liam Quigley and Mike Moloney, and journalist Eileen Brophy - the computer's musical emissions, like the station's signature tunes and visual material, could be emitting anywhere in the English-speaking world.
That doesn't mean everything is bug-free: in one day's sporadic listening I heard two DJs give time-checks that were wrong by a full hour (one of them was corrected soon after), and the news-writing and presentation leave something to be desired (Brophy can't do everything). The bits of current-affairs and human-interest content in Williams's morning programme, Dublin Today (Monday to Friday), are as near as Lite comes to something substantial that feels home-produced.
The format without frontiers, well-known to anyone who has ever visited a US dentist's office, is not entirely without its strengths. Lite's computer playlist is at least colour-blind: there is far more black music on Lite than on any of RTE Radio 1's MOR music programmes. Of course, I Just Called to Say I Love You doesn't represent any great triumph for soul, but we take our multiculturalism where we can get it (though I draw the line at Ebony and Ivory).
On the other hand, Irish music is conspicuously thin on the air amidst all the Celine Dion, Paul Simon, Don McLean and Robbie Williams. Without Boyzone (Love Me for a Reason) and Mary Black (No Frontiers), Ireland would be virtually inaudible.
Even more interesting artists tend to be represented, over and over, by their dullest songs. Among the computer's guidelines seems to be: any song less than 20 years old cannot have an actual human drummer. I haven't visited the Lite premises, but I imagine a giant computer screen in the studio that monitors the beats-per-minute of the music being played, and goes Code Red if certain limits of tempo are exceeded - at any time of the day other than Wake Up Hours, when we can go a bit crazy with Mrs Robinson and Cher's Shoop Shoop Song.
One of the ironies of the Lite formula is that BBC Radio 2 has moved from this slicker easy-listening format and gone a bit more sophis. Radio 2 is still laughable at times, with its hick outsourced documentaries, such as Daryl Hall (Daryl Hall!) presenting More Giants of Soul (Wednesday), but it's getting better. And still and all, More Giants of Soul this week delivered an hour of music and thoughts about Prince, placed cosily and sexily in his relation to the soul-music tradition, from his first single, Soft and Wet, in 1977. I'll definitely take that, when Lite is just soft and wet without the caps and italics, and shows no signs of interest in His Royal Purpleness, despite his immense interest to us over-35s.
The BBC is of course capable of far sharper and notably well resourced little documentaries. On the Road (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday) casually crossed the Atlantic a couple of times to accompany a British parliamentary committee investigating cancer research in the UK and the US. Scarily, we saw the randomness of who gets what cancer treatment in Britain. A leukaemia patient told us he'd never have got the successful bone-marrow transplants at the Royal Marsden if his granny hadn't mentioned it to him.
In the US things seem to be somewhat better. So is this a case of the success of privatised medicine triumphing over the mess of the NHS? It seems not. In Britain, research is charity-funded, in the US it's federally-funded and highly centralised - ever since Richard Nixon, in search of a gimmick, declared "war on cancer". As a result, cancer research and treatments are organised around a National Cancer Institute.
The programme took for granted that having the best research is essential to providing the best treatment, and it acknowledged but didn't explore the inequities of the current system. It ignored any EU dimension and neglected to mention preventative approaches to cancer. Nonetheless, it was vivid and thought-provoking, real policy-making radio, without a trace of slime.
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie