Radio Review: For the first time since it adopted its new format, music made sense on Marian Finucane, writes Bernice Harrison
For the first time since it adopted its new format, music made sense on Marian Finucane (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays). The evocative, energetic sound of Ladysmith Black Mambazo ended Monday's programme - the best hour of radio in the week. Finucane interviewed Archbishop Desmond Tutu and it made for such powerful, uplifting listening that there must have been people sitting in car parks all over the country, reluctant to get out and on with the business of their day for fear of missing a single word.
In Dublin to attend a conference on AIDS, Tutu was given the entire programme and it still didn't seem long enough. It is 10 years this April since the official end of apartheid in South Africa and he recalled growing up under the brutal system, hearing his father called "boy" by a young shop assistant and witnessing black children scavenging for food in the rubbish bin of a white school. Before he became an Anglican priest he was a teacher, but resigned when the curriculum was changed to remove maths and other subjects that it was felt a black child would never need.
"I did not want to collaborate with fobbing children off with an education for serfdom," said Tutu.
He talked of living in London as a young man with his wife, of asking a policeman for directions and of being so stunned and delighted when the policeman called the couple "sir" and "madam" that the two made a habit of asking for directions even when they knew the way. It was heart-melting.
Finucane did what she does best, letting her interviewee talk, but she skilfully shaped the interview with references to Tutu's role as chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and his life as a statesman and as a father.
Beneath his infectious giggles he gave glimpses of how his statesmanship is informed by his Christian beliefs. Finucane asked him if he ever thought that apartheid could not be beaten. If you look at the Resurrection, he said, you know that evil will never have the last word.
"I knew that apartheid was going to bite the dust - it was just a question of when, not if," he said.
In view of all the misery and degradation he has seen people inflict on each other, Finucane suggested he must be an optimist.
"No," he said, "I am a prisoner of hope."
In a week when there was extensive coverage of the conference on AIDS and when any sort of light at the end of that dark tunnel was difficult to spot, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday) showed how medical discoveries can happen in the most unexpected ways, changing lives in the process. Until the 1980s, "stress" was the cause regularly proffered by doctors for peptic ulcers, and sufferers who endured a lifetime of agony were offered drugs, and even radical surgery, to manage the problem. Then a young Australian scientist followed up on a colleague's suggestion that there was something peculiar in the biopsies of ulcer sufferers that showed there was a bacterium present. The received wisdom had always been that the stomach is so acidic that no bacteria could possible survive in such a bilious soup. But in the space of 20 years the Australian, Barry Marshall, proved that ulcers are caused by a bacterium and that antibiotics can sort them out. Presenter Hermione Coburn presented a science programme which, despite being loaded down with facts, was instantly accessible. The second part in this series next week should be worth a listen.
In so far as a tragedy can be said to be handled "better" by one medium than another, radio delivered the most insightful coverage of the Dublin Bus tragedy last week. The pictures, which simply showed buses at odd angles, couldn't tell the story. On radio, however, particularly on Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays), Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays), and The Sunday Business Show (Today FM, Sunday), presented by Matt Cooper, survivors, witnesses and family members told vivid, moving stories of how the five who died had lived their lives.
Radio also showed how the print media can get it wrong. One tabloid led with the dramatic story of a young student, trapped under two dead people, phoning her father, a guard on duty in a nearby police station. It was stirring stuff but it was wrong. On Wednesday's Liveline her garda father told how he was at home watching television when a call came from a woman to tell him what had happened. His daughter was indeed trapped but she called out her number to a passer-by, who phoned home. Another passer-by, a doctor, took care of her before she was rescued.
The true story was more powerful than any fictionalised version and there was something about the selfless actions of the two good Samaritans that echoed Archbishop Tutu's repeated belief in the triumph of good and in the human will to survive.