Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday) made no pretence of being pleased to be back from his holidays this week. If there was any pretence, in fact, it was to the contrary - he moaned and bitched and repeatedly descended into "narcoleptic fits". (Gerry, as I imagine you've since been told, Narcolepsy Is No Joke.) He was, nonetheless, quite wonderful, and never more so than when he was a star to place beside the sun and moon on Wednesday morning. With Brenda Donoghue up in the Phoenix Park, first accosting bewildered tourists, then joining the cheering moon-shadowers, the programme was set.
Ryan made it soar with his antics, from stumbling around the studio blinded by eclipse glasses to interviewing the curious punters and certifiably crazed apocalypse-watchers. As it went along, he gave way to a cheery, infectious awe, but meanwhile he captured the full absurdity of the pre-eclipse scaremongering with each roar of "Don't look at it!" That shock-horror media-generated folk wisdom about the special retina-scarring qualities of eclipsed sunlight in the tiniest quantities was up against our more sensible intrinsic knowledge that people sometimes get a harmless glimpse of the sun. Up in the Phoenix Park, it was also up against the repeated radio assurances from Astronomy Ireland that all the gear for safe eclipse viewing would be available there. It's no wonder that, having not even been briefed in advance on the simple materials needed for a "pinhole camera", viewers in the park employed the back of their hands (and were photographed doing so, with "in-spite-of-the-warnings" dismay, for TV and newspapers).
Sun was also the star, that same night, of The Roots of Rock'n'Roll (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday). P.J. Curtis's summer substitute for Tonight with Vincent Browne, suitably educational as well as toe-tappingly musical, climaxed not with an eclipse but with the dawn of rockabilly in the Memphis studio of Sun Records.
Curtis's task for the evening's involved digging along what might be called the white root of the rock'n'roll tree, country music - "the blues of the southern rural white . . ." A fascinating and perhaps surprising bit of scraping revealed, repeatedly, that this root had its own traces of colour.
Here, for example, was Jimmie Rodgers, "the original commercial country superstar . . . the Garth Brooks of the Twenties and Thirties", performing Blue Yodel Number 9, and by God if it didn't sound just exactly like a piece of out'nout black-folk blues (right up to the "Yodel-ay-hee" anyway). And who's that playing coronet so exquisitely on this ancient track? Why, Louis Armstrong - who better?
In his own suitably unsmooth "country" accent, Curtis traced the great names - many of them evidently Irish-descended (for a glimpse into the melting pot, check out Moon Mulligan doing Cherokee Boogie) - of bluegrass and honky-tonk, delivering wonderful sounds and songs (including Kitty Wells's immortal, proto-feminist It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk An- gels). Then came Sam Phillips and Sun, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash.
Suddenly, without any prior warning, just before 11 p.m., a Cash track finished and the radio seemed to burst with the sound of a young man with a lot on his mind and the voice to make it real: "uhBlue Moon . . . Blue Moon . . . Blue Moon - keep a-shinin' bright".
Even if we hadn't recognised the voice of Elvis, circa 1954, Curtis had quietly led us to his extraordinary talent, thoroughly connected to the music that had come before (this was Bill Monroe's old Blue Moon of Kentucky, after all) and at the same time utterly, shockingly new. For the first time, for this listener, Presley's crashing impact on people who had never yet seen him sway his pelvis was abundantly clear. (And Blue Moon of Kentucky was just the B-side!)
I'M a sucker for drama and passion, and the great music presenters on the radio know how to convey it with very few words and plenty of tunes. At his best, John Kelly with Mystery Train (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) sweeps us into his enthusiasms and tells stories - sometimes romances, sometimes political tragedies, sometimes jokes - through a sequence of songs. On Today FM, Donal Dineen's Here Comes the Night (Sunday to Thursday), though longer, develops similarly irresistible themes.
It's in this context that I find Paul Herriot's beautiful Blue of the Night (Lyric FM, Monday to Friday) - well - resistible. Herriot is a classic late-night presenter, his restrained voice (speak up, Paul!) reminiscent of Dineen, but for a more "mature" audience.
I gather that many people find him (his programme, that is) a charming bedtime companion; these include many of the old FM3 listeners for whom Lyric has otherwise been a major disappointment. (That disappointed listener is not me, for reasons the column will return to at a later date.)
However, for all its eclecticism - from antique choral works to jazz, blues and contemporary serious music - there's something technical and excluding about Blue of the Night, something just a little chilly for a summer night. Even Herriot's evident love of Ella Fitzgerald doesn't quite redeem it for me - she, after all, was often capable of turning what might have been an emotional wringer into a larynx workout, albeit a sublime one.
I'm not saying that strange, detailed on-air advert which Lyric FM is running to recruit new presenters should be targeting Herriot's slot. Undoubtedly his intelligent mix is right for a big chunk of the (small) intended audience - it just doesn't feed this philistine soul.