Radio Review:Going purely on the "what's rare is wonderful" theory, I had high hopes for a new comedy show, The Eamon Lowe Show (Today FM, Sunday).
This, after all, is the station that has Gift Grub on The Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show - consistently the best comedy on radio and in top form on Thursday with a hilarious Radio Roy skit. Though it is also home to the deeply unfunny and pointlessly obnoxious TJ and TJ sketches on The Last Word with Matt Cooper, so we know it can come up with a comedy dud. And that pretty much sums up The Eamon Lowe Show.
The set-up is that Lowe is a broadcast journalist recording a current affairs show in front of a "a live audience" - surely one of the most redundant expressions - and we know they were live because they laughed like drains at just about everything. In this first programme, he discussed policing with a "garda press officer" and "a politician" - fertile soil for satire, but the script was way too thin for the weight of the concept.
Comedy is of course hugely subjective, so if you roar with laughter - as the audience did - at the very mention of the placename Hackballscross, then this is for you.
The six-part series was recorded in June - but if you're trying to have a swipe at media coverage of current affairs, which I think might have been the underlying point of this show, then such a time frame is never going to encourage the sharpest work.
Fiona Looney, back with a new run of her comedy panel show Backchat (RTÉ R1, Tuesday), is much more up-to-date. "Now for the second round", said Looney, "a line Bernard Dunne never got to hear"; or panellist Kevin Gildea's riff on the prison-system sniffer dog which, it had been reported, had a contract out on his life. "He's in the witness protection programme, living as a cat in Monaghan." Smart, daft but funny, much like the show.
Also back for a second run was Whistleblowers (RTÉ R1, Sunday). Last year, producer and presenter Alan Torney had a stellar line-up of guests - even now, remembering Jeffrey Wigand, who blew the lid on the tobacco industry, and Sherron Watkins of Enron tell their stories can still raise the hair on the back of my neck.
What came through with them and others was an enviable mixture of selfless conviction and a complete lack of bitterness, even though they had fought so hard and lost so much - on a personal and professional level - to reveal the truth.
The new series started off with ex-Army Captain and now media lecturer Tom Clonan (and The Irish Times' security analyst), whose doctoral thesis revealed widespread bullying and harassment of female recruits in the Irish Army. Following his findings, an independent enquiry was set up and structures put in place to help ensure that such a culture is stamped out. Added to this, the massive media exposure of the research was the stuff that academics dream off. So result all round, surely.
Certainly Clonan's claims of the rough and foul-mouthed verbals he took from some former army colleagues were disturbing. But overall, there was an uncomfortable sounding air of victimhood about Clonan's emotion-laden telling of his story - oddly him as the victim, not the women. It sounded more like a therapy session then a programme fitting the mould of the last series.
Far more uplifting was the first of another new series of Luke Clancy's Sound Stories (RTÉ R1, Thursday), a curious, eccentric but superbly put-together programme which explored birdsong. Most fascinating was hearing Chris Watson's slowed-down recording of the wren. A sound recordist who usually works on nature programmes with the likes of David Attenborough, Watson did it to demonstrate the micro-symphonies that these birds can cram into an eight-second burst of song, so that instead of hearing rapid twittering as our ears normally do, each note rang out clear. It all apparently helps to prove that birds live at a different temporal speed than we do.
But the biggest sound of the week was of course the massive voice of the late Luciano Pavarotti who passed away on Thursday morning. Kudos to Ian Fox who was quickest off the mark with King of the High Cs (RTÉ Lyric FM, Thursday) a programme devoted to the man who made opera so populist, it was sung on terraces at football matches.
