How real is globalisation? Its development might be said to be uneven, at the very least. When, after weeks of rains and many widely publicised days of catastrophic flooding, "the West" manages to finance a half-dozen helicopters to pluck dying African people from tree-tops, the glossy picture of a small world - either of common, shared experience or at least of proximity and interdependence - looks suddenly, well, sodden. From Mozambique, where the floods are no respecter of national boundaries, even the images themselves seemed compromised by global inequality. The question that so rarely gets asked in Third World crisis situations - how come aid workers and journalists get food, jeeps, blankets, shelter and a ticket out of some refugee hellhole where they've been watching other people starve? - was unavoidable.
On Wednesday, the presenters on Five Live Drive (BBC Radio 5 Live) told us that many callers had phoned to complain about the radio and film crews taking up space on helicopters that should have been occupied by rescued people. Of course there is an obvious answer: those crews were telling the story so that "the West" would be encouraged to a stronger response that would save more lives, was the response that eventually came late this week. But the programme's hosts admitted that there had been considerable soul-searching on this issue at the BBC.
Fair enough: it's not in every crisis that you can conceivably say: "Those two people, now swept away by the waters, might have lived if a fat hack and his camera hadn't been on the last journey." But these complaints and that soul-searching also highlight a previous failure of imagination, because surely the needs of journalists in other crises (and the PR needs of the NGOs that look after them) have led to far more fatal wastes of precious resources; it's only the Hollywood drama of this week's scenario that has led to such an (equivocal) admission of parasitism. Luckily, Tony Blair's own guru of globalisation, Anthony Giddens, was on Off the Shelf (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday) to tell us that "apparent contradictions are part and parcel of the same process". I'm afraid, despite listening to Giddens for the full half-hour, that that is as near as I heard him come to saying something coherent and meaningful. Seattle, he said, was "a really, really interesting frontline encounter" between two aspects of globalisation, for example. He gave no notion, however, of where he stood in relation to that frontline. (He did opine, if you can call it opining, that there is "more of a balance of power than you might think" between corporations and the rest of us. What might you think of that?)
More characteristic rhetoric sounded like this: "We're living in a period of change when we're orienting ourselves toward the future much more than any generation has done."
Presenter Andy O'Mahony, to his credit, eventually suggested that Giddens's "third way" is really just about devising a new rhetoric when all politicians have moved to a consensual centre. This set off considerable Blairesque noise-making about passion, commitment, emotional focus and values, of which the climax was: "You can't live in a world where nothing is sacred". Nothing sacred? Let me tell you about Yes Sir, I Can Boogie (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday), an astonishing new comedy series written and performed by people with disabilities. It featured some close-to-the-bone satires on politically correct language as it applies to disability. ("We don't actually say what's wrong with them," says a budding PCer. "We don't actually say `wrong' . . ." corrects a more seasoned colleague.) And there's other rather more lunatic material. Top of the looney list was the weekly feature, There But For the Grace of God; this week's tale was the inspirational story of a little boy who, from an early age, was identified as being superbly developed in the area of his brain which controls tap dancing. However, that potential was tragically, ahem, cut off when his parents took him to a magic show and he was volunteered for a sawing-in-half trick that went horribly wrong. "His parents put his screams down to nerves. In a way, they were right."
If that's not in sufficiently bad taste for you, what about the one-armed poet visiting a school to give a reading? His work is a piece of agonised doggerel called Flapping Sleeve and he continually screams at the children: "Stop clapping! Stop clapping!" Lest ye more evil-minded readers flock to the wireless next Tuesday at 11 p.m., be warned: very little of Yes Sir, I Can Boogie was as funny as (I think) the above samples are. But the unfunny bits weren't harmless or soft, they were mostly just weird; indeed, the studio audience laughed so hard that I suspect this lot may be pioneering visual humour for radio.
At the risk of being mockably PC about it, I don't think I'm qualified to say whether any of this qualifies as objectionable; I also don't reckon it's exempt from "objectionability" on the basis of the disabled status of its creators. (Howzat for fence-sitting? Move over, Giddens.) Maybe, just maybe, it begins to move the depiction of disability beyond the confines of this argument. Thursday's Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) broke the news of what is arguably Ireland's first real multimedia mogul-ing. Scottish Radio Holdings, with interests in stations in the North and a major directing stake in Today FM, looks set, Geraldine Harney told us, to acquire Ireland on Sunday.
A national newspaper and a national radio station in effectively the same hands? Neither outlet has anything approaching a dominant position in the market, to put it politely; however, the "synergy" raises a question of principle that should be addressed sooner, because it's all too certain to arise in more significant ways later.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie