Radio Review: It's been a while since there was a "parked car" moment on the radio - an item that holds you in your seat, listening long after you've arrived at your destination and then keeps you there after it's over wondering about the tough breaks some people have, writes Bernice Harrison.
Last Saturday Marian Finucane (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday) had Dubliners Sandra and Davy Conroy in studio. Their daughter, Celine, a mother of three, was found dead in violent circumstances in Spain last month. Her partner, Paul Hickey, is in police custody. The children are back living with their grandparents. But, and here's why the couple agreed to go on national radio, Sandra and Davy still haven't been able to find out when Celine's body will be released for burial back here. It could be tomorrow or two years, they don't know.
Their cry for help was also a masterclass in interview technique. Finucane was equal parts empathetic confessor and clear-sighted reporter. She took the Conroys through an ordered time line, starting with their discovery that Celine was into heroin at 14, prompting them to send her off to live in Devon with an aunt to get her away from the crowd she had fallen in with. That crowd included Paul, a childhood sweetheart. When the grandparents went off on a tangent, Finucane gently pulled them back, and when the truth was being bent out of shape she quickly straightened it out. "She was never into heavy drugs," said Sandra. "I thought she was taking heroin," cut in Finucane, lifting the rosy tints. "Yes, but that was in the past," her parents said, "She was on methadone."
The grandmother has had to field her nine-year-old grandson's questions about why his mammy and daddy are in the newspapers and "how can me ma come home in a plane if she's dead?" And just when you thought the story couldn't plunge any deeper, Sandra said simply and without drama that the reason she's so keen to get a date for her daughter's return is that she has been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer - on the day her daughter died, to add gothic misery to the story - and doesn't want to start the gruelling six-week treatment for fear that she'd be too ill to attend the funeral. At this stage Finucane crossed the line of impartiality - who wouldn't - and urged the clearly ill woman to go for treatment.
There were no impartial voices in Landscape without White Bungalow (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday). Presenter Kevin Connolly followed Donegal artist Janet Ross, who is working on a project to capture the landscape of Donegal before the creeping rash of bungalows destroys it forever. "She'll have to make haste, real haste," said Prof Anne Cruickshank, an art expert and Donegal inhabitant who pointed out that soon the only part of Ireland that will have any unspoiled coastline will be Antrim, which, she said, is largely owned by the National Trust.
Tom Paulin was poetically pragmatic about it all. He's been coming to Donegal since the 1950s, when, he said, the county was a sort of Shangri La for Northern Irish people. Yes, there are holiday homes and tourism now but it's brought prosperity to the county. When he looks out at the countryside he sees the landscape as it was 40 years ago - the bungalow blight somehow edited out by his memory.
Another man with an imaginative vision is Richard Beirne. His quirky series, A Bitter Taste of Beauty (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday), kicked off this week and it's worth getting by the arty title as the first programme at least was both an interesting and often funny take on our modern obsession with the body beautiful. Beirne fancies getting a Brad Pitt-type six pack - what's holding the self-confessed 10-stone weakling back is a penchant for steak sandwiches followed by a Mars bar, washed down with a pint or two. As the instructor in the gym told him, the six pack is in there somewhere, but unless the layer of fat that's hiding it goes, it'll be hard to find. In a Dublin gym he met bodybuilder Aaron, who had long ago found his inner six pack and is keeping it with mountains of protein and an exercise programme that was exhausting just to listen to. Apparently, for men, it's all about achieving an X shape - big shoulders, tiny waist, big thighs. When you look this good you feel good, he told Beirne.
Like gym bunny Aaron, former Labour leader Ruairí Quinn has no problem in the self-image department. He was doing the radio rounds this week promoting his autobiography. Matt Cooper (The Last Word, Today FM, Tuesday) asked him to name a policy he was proud of and he cited the establishment of social employment schemes, which he said was "dare I say it, masterful".