She's a cheeky one, is Marian. There she was, trying to out-Gaybo Gaybo: "Say `Thank you, Marian'," she said to him, acting like she'd sorted out his Dublin freeman thingy. Ah, but Gay bested her. He was talking in that nice, deep, I'm not-actually-switched-on-at-the-moment voice, so intimate really, and he said: "It's you who should be thanking me, Marian."
That remains to be seen, doesn't it Gay?
"Marian Finucane is lost to radio since the change." So says an 80-year-old listener who recently wrote to this column. "Old Timer" admires Finucane, in contrast to "sensational seekers" such as Gay, Pat Kenny and "all the new youngsters with very dubious accents and grammar", and perhaps, in her disappointment, she is being harsh. While you certainly can't say with confidence that the programme "works", Marian Finucane (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) is still young. Its busy team is defying the misguided accusations that the programme is simply "telephone-driven" and Finucane herself - though you'd never call her witty - is starting to show she can mix it up in the morning style.
What she can't do, yet, is perform the chatty, entertaining, straight-to-the-listener stuff. When she rather stiffly reads a bit from the tabloids, one gets a picture (quite possibly inaccurate) of a researcher having clipped it for her. Whereas with Gay Byrne one had a different image (almost certainly inaccurate), of a man who simply wouldn't go on air until he'd digested his Daily Express.
There's also a related sense with Marian Finucane of a programme that's already in the bag at close-of-business the day before. On Wednesday, when most listeners awoke under a blanket of snow, imagine the fuss Gay would have made; perhaps he'd have had Joe Duffy out pulling cars from the ditch on the Athy to Kilcullen road. (Okay, probably not - nostalgia is getting the better of me.)
Finucane passingly referred to the weather before moving on to three tidy packages. One of them, in fairness, was a modest follow-up to the late-breaking cervical-smear story. None of them, including a triumph-over-tragedy interview and an explanation of Aung San Suu Kyi in light of the freedom-of-Dublin row, was likely to keep jumpier listeners from Gerry Ryan's piss-take Christmas special.
Nonetheless, Marian Finucane has pulled itself together in three months and carved out some sort of identity. The host, while still insecure-sounding about the breadth of her role, is the comfortable, excellent interviewer she always was, and discernible lines run through a week's shows: Joe Doyle and Sean Haughey talk about Gaybo on Monday; Gay appears on Tuesday; Aung San Suu Kyi is discussed on Wednesday. Or this one: a marriage counsellor talking about adultery on Monday; Wednesday, a letter from a philanderer about how his mobile-phone bill almost scuppered him; and extramarital affairs, I'll wager, will be a running theme for weeks.
"Sexual adventure" of this sort figured briefly when "risk" was the theme of Prof Anthony Giddens's second Reith Lecture (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday), which, after a promising start, turned into yet another illustration of the nervousness of today's intellectual elites. Although he's fond of capitalism, Giddens yearns, in the light of unprecedented environmental and economic uncertainty, for a global regulatory system to "manage risk".
The talk included one decent risk joke: A man jumps from the top of a 100-storey skyscraper; as he passes each floor he can be heard saying: "So-far-so-good, so-far-sogood, so-far-sogood . . ." The lecture feedback included a striking observation on the wider theme of "globalisation" of the sort Giddens would hardly make. "In Goa," an Internet correspondent commented, "I recently saw men, women and children, working with 19th-century tools, digging a trench for the laying of fibre-optic cable."
Giddens described risk as a hallmark of modernity, an idea invented by 16th- and 17th-century explorers and developed by bankers and insurers to create capitalism. "All previous cultures have lived primarily in the past . . . Risk refers to hazards actively assessed in relation to future possibilities." It's about, he said, "seeing the future as a territory to be conquered".
Meanwhile, a good pal of Giddens, Tony Blair, is showing a relish for his (bit) part in conquering Serbia which must embarrass even his previously unshamable supporters - and makes Bill Clinton sound positively detumescent.
Well, as Blair is to eagerness, Kevin Myers is to expertise. Today FM's Last Word (Monday to Friday) has been blessed with our man's presence in Dunphy's vacated chair this week. Myers brings a sense and knowledge to discussion of the Balkan crisis, and of war in general, which dwarfs RTE's battle-ready lads, such as Pat Kenny, Des Cahill, Myles Dungan and Vincent Browne.
What's more, he's been interviewing an expert worthy of the name, a man who makes the admirable Robert Fisk sound like a neophyte. Former soldier Duncan Bullivant has extensive military experience in the region, but his contribution goes way beyond battle tanks and battalions.
His opinions are interesting, mixing profound distaste for Milosevic with sympathy for the Serbs' historical grudge and support for an early land campaign with opposition to a longer-delayed, larger offensive. But it is Bullivant's liberal sprinkling of real information which makes him invaluable. After 20 minutes of him, listeners at last might have some of the geographic, political, cultural, military and historical context to make up their own minds. One hopes there will be more of him.