Everyone's a critic. Everyone's a radio critic, anyway. If this column ever had any inclination to project an image of unique authority on the subject (and yes, they do encourage that around here), the effort is fatally undermined every Sunday evening by Making Waves (RTE Radio 1).
Making Waves is the latest in a dubiously honourable line of RTE feedback shows. (Feedback as in listener response, not "Guys, I'm getting an echo in my cans".) Call me a nostalgist - better yet call me a premature post-modern ironist - but I got more and better laughs from an episode of Mailbag back in the 1980s than I ever do from, say, The Blizzard of Odd.
Making Waves is there for a nation of radio critics to share their opinions about RTE radio, not just Radio 1 but 2FM, Lyric and Raidio na Gaeltachta. An unsneering Teri Garvey fields more than her share of cranky communications about "young people these days"; newsreaders who swallow the word "bulletin"; a presenter who says "Brahms's Lullaby" when she should say "Brahms' . . ."; and bringing back O'Donnell Abu. And Teri is more than happy to go off herself on the absence of regional accents on the airwaves. (Seems young people these days all learn to speak off the Australian soaps.)
But amidst the cheerful crankery there's plenty of good sense. Please won't Vincent Browne return to radio, one listener's letter begged. "He got away with things that other presenters - well, maybe Joe Duffy - just can't get away with . . . I promise never again to throw my shoe at the radio . . . ."
And (phew!) several listeners have been enjoying the twisted world of Roger Gregg's Tread Softly, Bill Lizard, now sadly finished and highly recommended in this space. "It makes up for the long wait since Scrap Saturday," one told Garvey. Two others complained that it's been a disruptive influence on Saturday mornings; as one wrote: "By the end of it, I'm so carefree and laughing I don't care what the house looks like."
There was none of that sort of good-natured guff in the other radio-critics' forum into which I wandered, unsuspecting, this week. Here was me thinking that comedy show Apres Match, at Dublin's Vicar Steet venue, was going to be about my great amateur passion, soccer. (I'll bet there were loads of you lot staying away for the same reason, no?) Turns out it's a devastating piss-take focusing on my semi-professional pursuit, Irish radio.
Most readers will probably be aware that Gary Cooke does an imitation of Eamon Dunphy that more than makes up for the long wait since Scrap Saturday. In Apres Match on stage, the focus is as much on Dunphy as radio interviewer as football pundit, and Cooke also gives an outing to the off-air Dunphy whom we like to think we know via the accounts of Navan Man and the Drunken Politician on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday).
And Dunphy ain't the half of it. Replacement Last Word presenters Matt Cooper and Kevin Myers also feel the Apres lash; Lord, there's even a few crashing chords of the Stone Roses theme music from the programme. The radio references don't stop at Today FM; there's Aonghus McAnally, Tony Fenton, Chris Barry, Adrian Kennedy. (The real Myles Dungan even turns up on video.)
Finally, there's the long, strange sketch featuring the three Joes. Cooke and his colleagues, Risteard Cooper and Barry Murphy, take to the stage in matching beards and specs and drone their way through an interminable, and hilarious, Liveline-inspired triple-monologue, punctuated by Duffyesque tics and squeaks, yeah-yeah-yeahs and uh-huhs, climaxing repeatedly and convulsively (for the audience anyway) with "I had a woman on there from Clontarf". The sketch goes beyond mere sharp-eared imitation - though it is that, too - and creates something utterly unforgettable.
I'm afraid, dear radio-lovers, Apres Match finishes tonight, and I'd wager it's sold out. You could always try going up there in your beard and specs and droning at the doormen until they let you in.
I was hoping for some reasonably sharp parody from Wild Amerika (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday), the US entry in the WorldPlay series of radio dramas. Erika Schikel's play sounded at first like it was going to have a go at the absurd reductionism of evolutionary psychology. Erika is in front of the telly, watching one of those silly documentaries that explain all human mating behaviour in strictly biological terms: "This female is ovulating - we can tell by her heavy use of jewellery. As this woman is tall and small-breasted, she is likely to attract a man with low testosterone . . ."
Erika, meanwhile, muses on the strictly non-reproductive activities she likes best: "Kissing, which serves as the preview for the main sexual event . . . how should I put this . . . cunnilingus."
The tension is soon lost, however, as her monologue turns into a sub-Bridget Jones account of her pregnancy and childbirth, full of worries about "nipples going National Geographic" and whether she is either "unfit for motherhood, or doomed to become a Stepford Wife". There are some funny lines ("Week 39: Your baby is now the size of Marlon Brando"), and I liked the (male) obstetrician's absurd words of encouragement: "If anyone can deliver this baby vaginally, you can."
The presenter of that fictitious TV show, Darwinia Meade, would be no friend of the great anti-reductionist Darwinian, Stephen Jay Gould. Gould, we heard on Night Waves (BBC Radio 3, Tuesday) has a new book that, according to presenter Richard Coles, "proposes an entente cordiale between old-guard religion and avant-garde science".
Gould says science and religion have "non-overlapping magisteria". But the Night Waves panel was entirely composed of scientists with religious convictions, none of them entirely inclined to agree with Gould. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a Quaker, was introduced by Coles as "the cosmologist who discovered the pulsar, here in the studio - she didn't discover the pulsar here in the studio . . ."
In the pulsar-free studio, Burnell said there were strong parallels between her religion and her science. Questing Quakerism, she said, "is not a comfort zone". When Coles suggested to her that physicists these days "have been speaking more and more like mystics", she replied: "I hope so . . ."
John Pickering, a psychologist who described himself as "not Buddhist, just Buddhish", accused Gould of "perpetuating a drama of conflict and hostility which we could well do without". And Mustafa Iqbal, a chemist who is also a Muslim, explained how central science is to Islam: "Nature itself is . . . a sign of God" - more than that, it is "one of the three basic ways of attaining faith". (The other two are history and logic, he obligingly elaborated.)
I love the way Night Waves gets unassailable experts on absolutely everything, right down (up?) to blood-sucking dentition. Thus, the same night, there was cultural historian Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art no less, talking about Shadow of the Vampire, the new movie about the making of FW Murnau's expressionist silent classic, Nosferatu: "The thing about Nosferatu was that it was the only vampire movie to get the vampire's teeth right, where you have both an upper and a lower set and they're both very sharp, so you can sink your teeth into someone - I'd imagine [!] - into someone's neck like a rat and sort of tear at it. Whereas Lugosi and Christopher Lee just have an upper set, and they just put their fangs into someone's neck and they get stuck there, you know?" You'd despair of them, really.