RADIO drama doesn't often come like this in Ireland: a new play by a writer who's biggish in other media; stars of stage and screen; an up-to-the-minute, issue-oriented scenario. It was all there on the Beeb last night: On the Eve of the Millennium (BBC Radio 4, Friday).
Thank God radio drama doesn't often come like this in Ireland. Warren Mitchell was the star, as a grouchy old West Ham supporter, his Alf Garnett minus the bigotry but plus Alzheimer's. Not to worry: Alzheimer's can be confusing all right, but old Tom wows the crowd at a trendy Docklands comedy club with his ancien routine, charms his son's trendy girlfriend Kate (Cathy Tyson, no less) and has even got in touch with his trendy clairvoyant powers (Granda was a gypsy, don't you know).
Barrie Keeffe wrote The Long Good Fri- day, and his radio play seems like a bit of heartfelt Cockney nostalgia. But that is no grounds for acquittal. More evidence for the prosecution: the Dome-dropping references to the millennium - Tom's son is some class of event-designer for the Big Event - and, still worse, the sudden intrusions on to the soundtrack of Cat Stevens singing Father and Son. I wish I were joking.
Back home to some good stuff: it was an image of what we were, and it was among many striking moments in Peter (no relation) Browne's small and perfectly formed documentary about (wait for it) a German uilleann-pipe maker, Andreas Rogge: A Pipemaker's Journey (RTE Radio 1, IT]Wednesday). Okay, here was young Andreas, circa 1979, recently sprung from his native land, poor, grey East Germany, but not quite settled in West Germany, so he heads for Dublin on holiday and steps out of Connolly Station: "I felt something like coming home. It wasn't clean and nice like western Germany - it suited me very well."
Well, in fairness, there are still plenty of parts of Ireland that would pass for the old eastern bloc, some of them not a stone's throw from Connolly Station. But nowadays you rarely hear the arguments about whether Ireland belongs in the First, Second or Third World, and we rarely make our east-European visitors feel at home.
We skipped over the fascinating surface of Rogge's life story; this programme didn't explore many emotional depths, apart from his nostalgic memory of the value of friends in the old GDR - the nostalgia then pierced by the realisation that many of his nearest and dearest were Stasi agents. As a young man he and his mates courted trouble with their slightly subversive folk music, but the course of his life was really set by a Dubliners' LP: "It was not so much the singing" - sorry Luke, hard luck Ronnie - "but the tunes they played." Then came a Planxty album. "That was actually the big kick for me."
Thus - after an escape attempt, a spell in prison and his release, in a "political prisoner exchange", to the West - came the holiday in Ireland, with a plan: "to buy a set of pipes, something like this fellow Liam O'Flynn played". The rest is history, well told here by himself, plus German and Irish friends, colleagues and customers - sometimes in the lovely and loving jargon of music-makers, but always accessible.
'Round this corner of the newspaper neigbourhood it's very rare indeed we get a Bank Holiday Monday off work. But hey, I look forward to such days anyway, because there's so often one of Colm Keane's "rockumentaries" on the radio. Actually, "rock opera" would often be a more appropriate term as, to the musical accompaniment of some old artist's hits, we're whisked through a series of triumphs and tragedies, 'til the stage is strewn with good-looking corpses and the fat lady (or wasted-away gentleman) is singing about new hope through God or Gestalt therapy.
Light My Fire (RTE Radio 1, Monday) should have been Verdi-esque. The subject was the Doors - and even if Jim Morrison's corpse was mysteriously hidden that July in Paris, all the other ingredients were there in copious quantities: rock 'n' roll, raunch 'n' Rimbaud. Moreover, Keane's interviewee was the next best thing to the Lizard King himself, Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek. Who knew that Ray would talk about his old friend and musical collaborator with all the insight and intimacy of an L.A. DJ? Who knew that he'd sound just like an L.A. DJ? The by-now-classic rhythm of Keane's work, whereby an artist's rambling confessions give way to periodic quick, sometimes glib summations from Keane himself, was hopelessly upset: Ray didn't ramble, and that's his picture next to "glib" in the dictionary.
Oh, Keane tried: "The demons driving Jim Morrison were clearly out of control," he told us. (I think that's supposed to be a bad thing.) But then up would pop Ray: "The Doors were fully developed human beings capable of all sorts of human emotions . . . . What does it mean to be alive on the planet? . . . That's what we were there to find out."
Occasionally Ray would start a potentially interesting discourse on the music (oh yeah, the music), then suddenly he'd go all sociological: "The whole American drug scene was one of wild exuberance and wild decadence," it seems. As for Jim, he was kinda like Dionysus - "the Greek god of wildness and craziness and fecundity" - only he drank an awful lot so he put on weight; that might have been his body that was buried in Paris, or maybe not.
Has Ray found Jesus or family life or management consultancy and turned his back on those old 1960s illusions? Well, why don't I let him tell you about his value system: "Make love, not war. Why should we make war? Let's make love, let's save the planet, let's have a good time, let's have a good psychedelic time, singing and dancing madly on a hillside, really enjoying ourselves and making love."
Did he mention making love?
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie