Radio with visuals? It's been done, and Eddie Holt gets to write about it. But it can also be done without the cathode-ray gadgetry, and radio - usually the most private, individual and intimate of media - can get a buzz that has nothing to do with a bent aerial when it packs up its kit and takes it on the road for all to see.
Maybe every DJ who's ever sat pushing buttons in a tarted-up "roadcaster" while bored citizens peer through the tinted glass wouldn't agree, but generally there is something a bit special about what you might call "public radio". If Gaybo in Grafton Street is the definitive model - albeit a discontinued model - there are other ways of letting the hoi-polloi into the "studio".
When several hundred people packed a Kilkenny function room last weekend to enjoy the company of US novelist Richard Ford, the Irish Times literary correspondent, Eileen Battersby, said it was the biggest crowd ever for a literary event in Ireland, and she would know. However, while there's no doubting Ford's attraction, this was also something else kind of exciting: a radio programme.
Ford's reading was immediately followed by an on-stage interview with Myles Dungan, to be broadcast on Monday's Rattlebag (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). Both parts of the event were incessantly publicised on the programme, with tickets given away for a fortnight. In other words, take a bow, Rattlebag.
Yeah, that goes for you too, Myles, even if you didn't look sufficiently at home on the stage to enjoy your curtain call.
Dungan, an interviewer who generally gets a good press hereabouts, inspired more than the bog-standard begrudgery in a ballroom full of amateur literary critics for the incessantly biographical, not-especially-sensitive and often uncomfortable-looking series of questions he put to a writer who, while occasionally prickly in a drawling sort of way, was actually a forthcoming, fascinating and very comfortable-looking interviewee.
The first of several collective sighs was sighed at Dungan's so-your-granny-was-from-Ireland? opener. But in fairness, the response brought us into immediate contact with the thoughtful and amusing Ford: yes, one grandmother was from Cavan - "which I've only come to know is culturally encoded in Ireland". He proceeded to assert that US locales don't come similarly encoded, a strange claim from a man who has set two great novels in New Jersey, the armpit of America, the place any smartass outsider knows immediately how to caricature: "You're from Jersey? What exit?"
Ford, anyway, has steered clear of hunting Gibsons in Cavan, in the hope of avoiding becoming "another culturally encoded cliche, Americans who rattle on about their Irish ancestry".
For Rattlebag he was compelled to rattle on more about his parents and pre-literary career. I don't know if the microphones picked up the sound of 100 jaws dropping when Ford, now in his mid-50s and the definitive chronicler of late-20th-century American divorce, revealed that he had "been married to the same woman since I was 19 and she was 17".
Certainly the biographical line of questioning told us what Ford is not: a memoirist in disguise as a novelist. "I make a lot of stuff up . . . In fact, I make most stuff up." He spoke of "the freedom not to write about myself", but was honest enough to respond to Dungan's question about similarities in character between himself and his two-novel protagonist Frank Bascombe with a long "Iiiiiiiii dunno".
Most disconcerting, perhaps, for those of us who manage to identify with some of Ford's most solipsistic characters, was what he suggested was the cautionary intent of these stories. Oops - you mean we shouldn't be like that?
Dungan eventually warmed to more thematic questioning, but this was not entirely free of the cringe-factor, such as the query which climaxed: "- is that part of the human condition as far as you're concerned?" Still, it was a really eye-opening half-hour or more with an unquestionably great writer, one who can joke about the similarity between the novelist he is and the cop he once wanted to be: "You can order people around, put 'em in jail if you want . . ."
If Richard Ford and the probing eyes of an arts-festival audience didn't showcase Myles Dungan at his best, there's no doubting this presenter's versatility. Having interviewed the Great American Novelist, he's off to Australia to help RTE audiences follow the fortunes of Irish rowers in the upcoming Olympic games, and to do so with unquestionable expertise.
That's left Kay Sheehy at the Rattlebag mike to carry on, and the programme continues to impress with its range of interests and its varied uses of the medium. It gives the lie to any notion that an arts programme can only be as interesting as its subject matter, consistently drawing blood from what most of us might regard as stones.
This week, a studio discussion about The X-Men skipped right over any of the "respectable" media's usual sneering about comicbook heroes and turned into a really charged debate about the film's presentation of its villainous character, Magneto - a mutant who is also a Jewish Holocaust survivor and bent on revenge for humanity's treatment of mutantkind.
Why is this evil character Jewish? Why does he mouth Malcolm X's rhetoric about resisting oppression "by any means necessary"? Should a movie with a comic-book ethos use the Holocaust as an emotional springboard? Tune in for the next episode . . .
RTE's own comic-book hero this week was Joe Duffy, flying into the 5-7 Live (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) studio via the telephone line to rescue director of radio Helen Shaw from a moderately and surprisingly awkward interview with Rachael English (a presenter who's delivered countless such pleasant surprises in recent months).
Joe from Clontarf, delighted that Liveline's listening figures had risen at "double the inflation rate", turned the chat all warm and cozy. But hadn't he ever been hurt by criticism in the press, Rachael wanted to know. "The only time I'm personally hurt is when me three kids jump on me together." He could definitely take that show on the road.