RADIO REVIEW: I Love TV (BBC World Service, Tuesday) is, on the face of it, a pretty incongruous title for a radio series. Sure, the most confident and sensible daytime-radio chat shows are happy to take some of their subject matter from last-night-on-the-box, but the denizens of this part of your page do try to maintain a certain chilly cynicism about the junior medium and its myriad inadequacies, writes Harry Browne.
Not so, young Ed Butler, presenter of this new documentary series and a bundle of enthusiasm if ever I've heard one. He and the programme purport to examine the world's devotion to television, but even by the World Service's globe-trotting standards this is excessively, confusingly peripatetic - in the first half-hour we heard about the US, Mali, Tanzania, India, South Africa, Brazil, Uganda, Nigeria and Egypt, and the facts and ideas jumbled for space in the listener's memory bank.
Butler told us, for example, that the world is not nearly so swamped with US-made TV as critics suggest. OK, so why give such prominence to the Indian woman who ribs her husband for his love of Baywatch (he praises the scenery)? To the Ugandan child who watches Sesame Street and Johnny Bravo? Or the voices from all corners talking about Friends? Well, so lots of people do watch American television, one critic admitted, but it's not some sort of imperial lifestyle instrument. In Nigeria, for example, viewers love Dallas because it reminds them of bygone days in their own country when families were more close-knit - JR as traditional clan chief, if you like.
You don't have to buy this show's premises to enjoy its voices and factoids. In Latin America, for example, only half of households have a phone, but 90 per cent have a TV. In poorer parts of the world, extended Indian families gather to watch Hindu religious drama on a TV hooked up to a tractor battery, and whole villages in Mali view a Brazilian soap, Terra Nostra, full of rich white folks. Cops, lawyers and doctors are drama mainstays everywhere, but Tanzania's favourite show is about South African miners, and Mexican novellas are huge in Russia. Everywhere, TV is widely blamed for fuelling migration. Meanwhile, back in TV's American motherland, the increasingly diverse broadcast media no longer provide the "cultural glue" that helped hold an immigrant nation together in the 20th century.
What a vicious media beating was administered this week to certain politically marginal elements, whose hardline, ideologically-driven position on the US role in the world and the Iraq war had allegedly gained disproportionate influence and media attention. It all seemed more than a little unfair - after all, the Progressive Democrats are entitled to express their opinions, no matter how out of touch they are with the Irish mainstream.
Across the schedule, but most particularly on Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), the brickbats directed at Mary Harney and Michael McDowell often comprised Americans of the most indubitably Middling sort expressing their opposition to war. That was fair and fine, but it did rather beg the question of how one (especially one PD) goes about defining the "normal" range of opinion. Maybe Mary should get out more.
This column is blue in the face - look, you can see it there in the photo - from pointing out that in Dublin, home of the protesting hordes, the Left is the major political current: the Greens, Sinn Féin, the Socialist Party, the SWP and red-green independents had a combined first-preference vote last year that dwarfed not only the poor old PDs, but Fine Gael too. Add in Labour's (also lesser) vote and the Left is bigger than Fianna Fáil - which is, anyway, led by a self-proclaimed socialist.
Is it any wonder it can draw a crowd? In most "artistic communities" in the western world over the last two-plus centuries, there can be little doubt that the mainstream flows decidedly gauche. These days, if you tune your PC into the invaluable syndicated Democracy Now! (Monday to Friday, available on www.democracynow.org), you can hear even the Hollywood likes of Marisa Tomei denouncing Bush and his war plans.
Lebrecht Live (BBC Radio 3, Wednesday) took a close look at the artist's licence to propagandise. It's not surprising that the programme tended to idealise and overstate the role of artistic resistance, which by this account put paid to Stalin, stopped the Vietnam War and brought down apartheid. But when Radio 3 rounds up an international panel of decidedly sub-Hollywood artists to discuss and defend the politics of their practice, there is no doubt that the station is doing its job.
Author Justin Cartright insisted on unfettered artistic freedom, but pointed out that some writers are "grinders" and some "incisors", and societies need both. "I don't think writers - and this applies to all artists - are under any obligation to have an opinion," he said. "It just happens that most artists have spent a lot of time thinking about issues and the best of them shine a light on those issues." And thus spake Ms Dynamite.