For the first time within the radius of our hearing, in the era of round-the-clock radio news and a sizeable chunk of the adult population carrying mobile phones, a major human catastrophe in a first-world city unfolded "live" on the airwaves.
The place to hear it, if you could bear it, was BBC Radio 5 Live. In fact, early Tuesday, the news-talk station's 5 Live Breakfast (Monday to Friday) didn't devote as much time to the Paddington rail crash as retrospect might suggest. There was simply no telling what a monstrous disaster this was - though the black cloud the presenters told us was visible across west London from Ladbrooke Grove to the 5 Live studios should have given them some clue. What the station did do, however, was bypass the old, established lines of information. It was later said that 5 Live had no fewer than three staffers actually travelling on the two relevant trains, and there were certainly reports from named eyewitnesses very quickly after the incident.
In fact, the crash was on-air at 8.21 a.m., only 10 minutes after it happened, with a reporter looking toward it from a nearby road - though she was not quite certain what sort of explosion she was looking at.
This sort of immediacy means that familiar cliches about the efficient response of the emergency services are also bypassed, since for a change it's not the emergency services supplying the information. Instead, the 5 Live reporter told us she was looking at ambulances and fire engines arriving to find locked gates that prevented them from entering the Railtrack area. It was only minutes later that we heard directly from passengers who survived the crash. The now-familiar stories of leaping carriages, hurtling wreckage, rising temperatures and doors that wouldn't open were told by men who were still in shock, the chill occasionally running through the voices that came loud and clear through their mobile phones. Of course there was still some confusion. The first of these eyewitnesses, from the Inter-City train, thought his train had "ploughed into the back" of another train. However, he was quickly followed by a survivor from the local service to put the record straight; again, within a short time of the crash, the programme's presenters had accurate information - vital to so many listeners - about exactly which trains were involved, and about the fact that they had essentially collided head-on.
Then, that same telecommunications revolution that brought such vivid and awful reporting from the scene of the accident yielded one of its most dreadfully poignant images. On the same afternoon's 5 Live Drive (Monday to Friday), we heard from the transport-police spokesman who was involved in co-ordinating the rescue. The teams trying to cut through the wreckage, he told us, "can hear mobile phones ringing and ringing from inside the carriage, where we know there are dead bodies".
THE early-evening talk-and-tunes slot on Lyric FM, The Green Room, has, I think, been one of the real successes of the schedule, taking on a different theme or genre each night of the week.
Tim Thurston's new six-parter for that hour, Jazz Y2K (Monday) is a natural, too, what with the extraordinary trendiness of the music these days and a reasonable amount of good retrospective fin de siecle programming already around. Thurston's stated interest is in the future of jazz.
All very well and good. The first part was full of interesting music and intelligent reflections, but there remained a certain Lyric-y suggestion that the merit of this music, a measure of its progress, was in "how far we've come from New Orleans".
Oh, there was the usual respect paid to the way jazz breaks down old genre barriers, but it was often to introduce "chamber jazz" or a jazz interpretation of Schubert. Thurston's introduction to a track from MMW's Combustication was sadly telling: "Its debt to the funkier side of popular dance music is clear, but it's full of surprise and humour." But? Frank McGuinness is in no doubt that the art form that will survive from his lifetime is rock music, and that the articulation of grief in Elvis Costello's voice will be one of its most enduring monuments. So Costello was the playwright's perhaps-surprising choice as The Giant at My Shoulder (RTE Radio 1, Monday).
Any half-hour programme that includes Alison, Watching the Detectives, Oliver's Army, Shipbuilding and New Amsterdam is already well on the way to classic status. Combine that with McGuinness's extraordinary, passionate essay about Costello - which is to say, about the paradoxical unities of love/hate, marriage/murder, home/exile, Ireland/England - and it had me sobbing into my Walkman.
Joking about Costello's history as a carpenter's apprentice, McGuinness used the opportunity to take a few funny pot-shots at the millennium and the Jewish "magician" whose birth is being marked. "I don't believe in the end of history," he said, "any more than I believe in the end of geography."
Costello's "strained whisperings [urge] treachery against all those that understand the millennium, everything that they believe in, and that is faith, that is fatherhood, and that is fatherland. I think these are Elvis Costello's subjects . . . I love the way he frees you from mocking these subjects. He mocks them with such wit, and such waywardness, there's no necessity to panic in the face of their terrors. I love the way he eschews wisdom and settles for three or four minutes of casual conversation . . . ."
The playing and parsing of Alison took me back 20 years to a Costello concert, when the girl beside me, the girl I loved (/hated?), cut loose with a bloodcurdling scream as Elvis promised "my aim is true". In McGuinness's reading, this song - certainly readable as a death threat - is "a true way of saying goodbye".
Although on the strength of the song selection here, McGuinness's conversation with Costello seems to have stopped nearly 20 years ago, both men have too strong a respect for history to make that an issue. I'll gladly listen to such ruminations from McGuinness well past Y2K.