Radio Review: Look what Vincent Browne wrought all those years ago when, frustrated by the refusal of the authorities to allow microphones into the tribunal proceedings at Dublin Castle, he determined that his radio programme would simply have to use actors to read highlights from the transcripts.
The tribunals were transformed from turgid legal proceedings to what Saturday View (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday) billed as the most expensive entertainment in the history of the State.
The extraordinary talent, dedication and eyes to the main chance of the two principal actors, Joe Taylor and Malcolm Douglas, has resulted in several stage productions over the years. Last weekend the latest edition, in Project arts centre in Dublin for a brief run that is destined for a Christmas DVD, was excerpted and discussed on Saturday View, and your intrepid columnist ventured forth to review it in the flesh for the first time.
Being intrepid, I've got quibbles with The Tribunal Show. Most of the songs and links with which it joins up various verbatim tribunal excerpts were, despite the great warmth and talent of singer Susie Kennedy, just a bit too flat and obvious, as was the stagecraft. Bold actors must learn that they cannot truly thrive without writers and directors! But, ahhh, the history that lies in the series of familiar transformations. Taylor as Gogarty. Taylor as Burke. Taylor as Lawlor.
Less familiarly, most hilariously, Taylor as Denis Foley, the sad TD repeatedly asserting that "I hoped against hope" that an offshore account might prove to be something other than an Ansbacher.
And all evening, lovingly, Taylor as Haughey, a rich, revelling impersonation that is grist to the "living legend" mill. Particularly wonderful is Charlie's merry dancing with the tribunal from the transcript of the in camera testimony at Kinsealy, at one point toying with the word "hypothocate", found by Haughey in Michael Smurfit's statement.
And if Charlie's the hero of the revue, the barristers are undoubtedly the villains. In this quick-change format the subtlety of Malcolm Douglas's characterisations is clearer than on radio, the Law Library vanity and playing-to-the-gallery all too perfectly conveyed.
Would that the Irish historical drama in Dungannon (BBC Radio 4, Friday) was as subtle. This play about how the civil rights movement started was political history as a game of connect the dots, full of characters making stilted little speeches that placed them precisely on a little grid of religion, class and gender. Perhaps the schematic scenario - poor Angela's wee baby chokes in an overcrowded council house while her teenage Protestant workmate Michelle gets a new gaff as soon as she announces her engagement - will amaze and astound British listeners. But throw in the play's eagerness to caricature nationalist politicians for their trivial obsession with the border, mix it with a drunken priest all too fond of the status quo and you've got a package with perhaps more than its share of Catholic villains.
That increasingly Troubled portrait of Dungannon was a far cry from the Ireland of the 1960s and early 1970s conjured up by Paolo Tullio, guest on Snapshots (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday). Tullio drew a matter-of-fact portrait of the restaurateur as a young man, swanning around Trinity College in Dublin in the throes of extraordinary overprivilege courtesy of £25 a week (an enormous 1960s sum) from his father.
He was, he said, considered rather outré. "I suppose the fact that I used to wear a gold lamé cape and carried a walking cane with an ivory top and had a little goatee beard might possibly have had something to do with it."
This Brideshead-meets-Beat character was at a bit of a loss when he was done having a campus to parade through, but he soon moved his one-man show to the lobby of the Burlington Hotel, where he could tout for translating work among the visiting businessmen.
After he'd accompanied a succession of Italians on meat-buying missions - a commercial phenomenon of the era, apparently - he realised he knew enough to begin making the introductions in more than just the interpreting sense, and he became an agent.
He insisted to an insufficiently sceptical Carrie Crowley that his little white sports car and gold lamé wellies (he'd got shot of the cape) gave him a formidable bargaining edge at myriad country marts.
Poetic justice demands that such a character should cross paths with Charlie Haughey. Tullio himself provided the location: the private dining room in his restaurant, where the Duce and his companion Terry Keane were, Tullio said, the only guests who ever used the room's little red light (switch inside, bulb outside the door) to deter unwanted intrusions.
Given the former taoiseach's immortal contribution to the art of radio, as voiced through the years by Dermot Morgan, Joe Taylor and himself, we can only lament that the light presumably did not signify "microphone on, recording in progress".