RadioReview: Marian is a good Irish Catholic girl who is holding out for her wedding night.
When it finally happens, it's going to be so fantastic that afterwards she's going to be sex mad, so she is, so she's planning a long winter between the sheets, while putting her new husband on vitamins.
"He'll be walking with a limp," quipped the presenter on 98FM's Morning Crew (Monday to Friday), but whether the wit was Dave or Dermot, I couldn't tell you. This is bright and breezy radio, perfect for sitting stock-still on the M50 while simultaneously chatting on the mobile, eating a bagel and doing your nails.
Con Murphy, standing in this week for Ryan Tubridy (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), gave the sense of a guy who knows that Marians exist. Interviewing Paul Howard, creator of Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, he wasted no time in informing us that Howard was a master of "dick lit" and he was well able to converse in new Dublin slang without a cue card. Things like getting a Jo Maxi cause you're too focking loaded to take the Dorsh, like. Howard aka O'Carroll was talking about his latest book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress, and mentioned that a shrine has been erected to O'Carroll-Kelly in the VIP area of a new club on D'Olier Street called 21.
Murphy has the sense to let his interviewees talk and he asks questions rather than making speeches. He seemed to have no desire to put his own unique personality across. It's a simple approach, but effective.
Tom McGurk, keeping the show going for Pat Kenny this week (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), was well-informed, urbane, asked the right questions and didn't preach. It was nice being on Radio 1's version of mid-term break, but why is the station so much like school? Kenny and Tubridy even work to the school-term schedule, getting the mid-term week off.
Kenny's show is a bit like a double period of science, while Tubridy is definitely the easy class - PE, like.
McGurk was more the genial headmaster, although some seem to think he has a leather hidden in the cupboard, just in case. On Tuesday, Ger Colleran, editor of the Star, didn't take too well to being called to the headmaster's office to have his newspaper labelled a "tabloid", perhaps because he was outnumbered in the studio by two broadsheet, Irish Times, journalists - Carol Coulter, legal affairs correspondent, and columnist John Waters - for a discussion on ethics and the upcoming establishment of a press council and legislation to protect privacy.
Colleran seemed to think it was a bit of a set-up: "I know what you're doing!" he told McGurk at the outset. McGurk politely mollified him and the ensuing discussion was informative, with Coulter putting everyone straight on what's happening in legislation.
Keeping things straight isn't always easy, though, even on Five Seven Live (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday). What was this about the Government planning to spend €34 billion on Transport 21? Soon it was going to take only six minutes to travel from Limerick to Dublin airport? Or was that €6 they were talking about? For the toll on the Atlantic corridor? With not even a spur to Kerry off it? Some €9 million a day to be spent on roads? Or was that the Taoiseach's make-up bill?
Rachael English pronounced herself bamboozled by the conflicting claims of Government and Opposition - and English is very rarely bamboozled. It was quite reassuring, actually.
On Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), a caller remarked that it was easy for Government to toss billions around on grand gestures, but it was far harder to do the small things that would really make a difference. The 60,000 people who the Society of St Vincent de Paul visits every year know something about that. More outrage.
On Wednesday night, Vincent Browne (RTÉ Radio 1) was asking who decides the priorities regarding St Vincent de Paul's worries and the extra €2 billion in the Budget. Why are they decided in secret? One of his guests was PD TD Mae Sexton, who one listener described as a young Pauline McLynn in full flight, waiting for the late Dermot Morgan to break in.
Browne asked: "There is still deprivation in society; do you think there's anything scandalous about this?" Sexton answered: "I appreciate there are certain people who are always in difficulty. I don't know why that is." Maybe they needed help budgeting, she seemed to imply.
Belinda McKeon's Word of Mouth (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday), which won second prize in this year's PJ O'Connor Radio Drama Awards, was about a young woman, Ada, who had fallen out of step with the crass, fast world of exterior life in modern Ireland. Her psyche had become consumed, for seven years, by the inner turmoil of her gran. Ada's brain had become a kind of host for her gran's, after her gran was sent to a nursing home as a punishment by her son (Ada's father).
Trapped in the world of her gran's residual turmoil, Ada had shut herself off from the world, with only the radio to keep her company. She began to make sense of her family's secret as she heard the voices of her gran's husband and lover coming through the radio, leading Ada's crass journalist brother to accuse her of being "schizo".
McKeon herself is a journalist, writing for The Irish Times, and seems well aware of the split between the exterior world of current affairs and the interior mind, where the real dramas are never reported in the paper. This was a lovely metaphor for the tension between journalism and creative writing, and between the materialistic world of current affairs and the inner life.
• Bernice Harrison is on leave
