RADIO REVIEW: Shameless stroking and self- promotion are themes of the season, what with the Joint National Listenership Research (JNLR) figures splashed all over the radio and other media, with little regard for modesty and only a little more for honesty. We'll bring you a bit more on those increasingly meaningless numbers later in the programme - but first, back to the other self-promoters and strokers.
Sweetest stroke of the season came last week on Mystery Train (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), where the summer presenters, as is the case annually, have been freshening up the mix. The DJ lads of late - Nick Kelly this week, Luka Bloom last week - are probably that bit whiter, folkier, more world-musicky in their musical choices than John Kelly, but eclecticism remains the paramount virtue.
That's why it was a particularly cheesy stroke to hear one of them ostentatiously plugging an album that's top of the charts, and by his brother to boot. Only that Luka's brother is Ireland's musical god-here-on-earth, the incarnate Christy, there might even have been a half-serious objection to be made. As it happened, it was cheesy, sweet and downright fill-your-heart-with-gladness lovely to hear The Artist Formerly Known as Barry Moore singing the praises of his big brother.
One of the nicer things about Mystery Train's 7 p.m. slot (of which I otherwise don't approve, clashing as it does with The Simpsons on Sky) is that the presenter has a rather better crack at getting out to a gig of an evening than when the studio made later demands on his (yes, it's virtually always his) time.
On the night in question, Luka Bloom rhapsodised about the return of the National Stadium for concert-goers, and it just so happened it was Christy and Donal Lunny and Declan Sinnott he'd just seen there on the South Circular Road. The show was, he swore, as good as the great old Moving Hearts gigs in the same venue all those years ago. Ah, remember those shows? (Lucky you - I don't.) But it wasn't just the recent and ephemeral concert that was wonderful, oh no. There's a whole CD full of wonder, apparently, and further praises were sung of Brother Christy's new live album. Lucky for Luka, he had the evidence to hand that proved this was no matter of mere brotherly love. Straight from the CD, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, and here's me with the good fortune to be driving down an empty country road on a misty evening, and the world sitting perfectly still and giving the singer a bit of ciúnas for the duration of the number.
Now, in fairness, Luka was downright miserly in his praise of the brother compared to the way Eamon Dunphy went on about his blood brother, his hermano, a man - "and I use the word 'man' advisedly", sez Eamon, meaning god-knows-what - who goes by the name of Roy Keane. Dunphy was a guest on his own programme this week - The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) - and if his self-promotion was shameless too, you could at least argue that his Keano book requires even less of this sort of plugging than Christy's album. It's a dead cert to top the charts.
Yes, it's unfortunate that Dunphy felt compelled to do down the previous man in his life, John Giles, in order to underline his new devotion, but in fairness he sounds like a man transfixed. Talking to his own substitute, Matt Cooper, he was virtually quivering with regret that he had somehow failed to protect the radiant Roy from the consequences of their joint devotion to the truth. It had never occurred to him, it seems, that a confession in print of premeditation in the case of an assault might arouse the interest of both the victim and the authorities.
Dunphy has never lost his knack for occupying the high moral ground; it's just as well this cherished territory isn't guarded by bouncers, though, because for all his eminent qualifications, he's been wobbling a bit lately and might not get past them.
Increasingly, he sounds like the radio voice we learned to love in the mid-1990s when he was a frequent guest on the old 98FM Vincent Browne programme, declaiming: "This is free speech radio, baby!"
The free speech argument in support of Keane's true confessions was trotted out here, and Dunphy does make it compellingly. The old pros' culture of silence in sport, and the lying media lines that surround it, are morally indefensible. It's Mafia stuff, I reckon, even if the usual punishments - disgraceful fines for "bringing the game into disrepute" and the like - are preferable to the old Moe Greene, Luca Brazzi or Pussy Bonpensiero treatment. The guys who defend it - you know who you are, Lawrenson - should rightly get eaten when Dunphy gets back in the studio and on the job.
But then the Dunph starts pretty much defending Keane's tackle on Haaland - did you know, it wasn't even the Norwegian's bad knee that Keane crashed into full force with his studs up - and your sympathy with the Red Devil and his Boswell (or is it Banquo?) starts to wane. The irony is that neither Dunphy nor the publisher is likely to get into any trouble - there's nothing defamatory about admitting you deliberately kicked sh**e out of somebody - but surely some legal eagle with an eye to crime should have looked at that passage and declaimed: "This is the mens rea, baby!"
For the last couple of years, the PC on my Irish Times desk had some strange, insurmountable network problem that meant this radio reviewer could listen to very little Internet radio. Now that I'm working from home, I'm having no problems. It means I get to listen (rebuffering permitting and at great cost to myself, of course) to the likes of Behind the News on New York City's WBAI (www.wbai.org or www.leftbusinessobserver.com), where the amazing Doug Henwood proves that David McWilliams is not the only economist who can host a radio show. Henwood also proves, once and for all, that the media really should go outside the brokerage firms for comment on the market and the economy. Last week, introducing an interview with Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, Henwood cracked aptly: "If the US were a smaller country, you'd say it was ready for a Structural Adjustment Programme." The line was particularly lovely because Stiglitz is a World Bank veteran and IMF critic, who has now decided that the IMF should be abolished altogether. Henwood and Stiglitz had an intelligent and accessible conversation that was a model for how to talk about this stuff.
What would such top-notch number-crunchers do with the way radio stations here play with their listenership figures? The semi-annual conflation, confusion, contempt and all-round con-jobs are increasingly tiresome, as a profusion of stations makes media mountains out of molehills - the petty variations that usually fall well within the survey's margin of error anyway.
Arguably the big winner is a no-brainer, a new pop station in Cork city, Red FM. I have hardly heard it, but I get anecdotal data: radio folks sneer at it; a gang of Cork teenagers I met lately said they are permanently tuned to it. Do your own maths.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie