Where's the best Irish radio drama being produced? Well, having listened recently to a shelf-full of innovative programmes from local and community stations around the State, in which plays were rarely essayed and never satisfying, this column can say with some pinch of authority that it ain't in Wicklow, Connemara or Coolock.
And all things considered, and despite admirable executive interest and a range of interesting radio drama streams, I respectfully submit that it ain't at RT╔ either.
Nope, national capital of the radio play is Belfast, where BBC Northern Ireland has been pouring out a steady flow of half-decent-and-better plays for broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Just in the last week or so, there have been two distinguished and diverse examples: plays by Gary Mitchell and Pom Boyd, starring the likes of Donal O'Kelly, Stella McCusker and Darragh Kelly.
Mitchell's status as dramatic chronicler of loyalism is underlined by The Force of Change (BBC Radio 4, Friday, June 1st), an inside-the-RUC play. All right, the punny title really belongs over Jeremy Paxman's shoulder as he introduces a Newsnight report, but the play has the ring of human - as opposed to journalistic - authenticity.
Mitchell's first point about the "change" sweeping the RUC appears to be that the force is now an appropriate locale for conventional police drama, a sort of "Belfast Blue". Det Sgt Caroline Patterson (excellent Abigail McGibbon), is interrogating a suspected UDA-linked hood - but she's running out of time before his release is due, and running out of the respect of her sexist colleagues before her promotion comes up.
Interrogation-room banter and tension is at this play's heart, and it's extremely well done and pretty credible to boot. A particularly nice touch for radio is the alleged "perp", whose sound UDA training means he doesn't utter a word.
When the play turns directly to the "political context", it's less successful. It's not entirely implausible, I suppose, that a veteran RUC man, Bill (Sean Caffrey), interviewing UDA man Stanley, would switch off the interrogation tape and make aggrieved analogies between the nationalist-inspired changes sweeping both their organisations: "I've sat in this station and watched my own organisation crumble. We even have Catholics involved these days, and the government wants more and more of them! If they got their way, the IRA would take over the police force... I've also sat here and watched your organisation crumble.. ."
It turns out that Bill, for a complicated set of personal and political reasons, has fingered Caroline to the UDA; she's up against what she calls "30 years of colluding with loyalists" by the likes of Bill. The political shouting match that ensues is ripping, all right, but too schematic and preachy.
Nonetheless, this is powerful stuff, in the end quite disturbing and not at all neat in its conclusions. When the UDA man finally talks, he commences an exchange that is the best summary I've heard of loyalist frustration and paranoia to date.
"Why aren't you lot out there catching IRA men?" he asks the cops angrily.
"We can't prosecute them for laughing, Stanley."
Laughing was a more appropriate response to Pom Boyd's dark-grey comedy, Try Tony (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday), which starred that impressive list of Irish acting talent cited above. The wonderful Donal O'Kelly sounded hardly a bit like himself as a bad- tempered driving instructor; the play saw him take tout Dublin (or at least four striking representatives) out for lessons - and who wouldn't be bad-tempered with students like these: "I wouldn't know the indicator button from the stop pedal," one tells him.
That's nothing compared with Stella McCusker's Celia, who screams: "I want to stop! I want to stop!", then jumps out in the middle of a dual carriageway. Or what about the southside quasi-bohemian who has trouble making out Tony's instructions: "I can't hear on that side - I fell out of a tree in Marianne Faithfull's garden when I was eight. I was hyperactive. .."
It's not all fun and games, by any means - Tony is a bitter widower with a drinking problem and a guilty conscience about his wife's death in a car crash. Boyd guides him carefully, lovingly and poignantly to a hard-earned feel-good ending, with help from the rules of the road and a few tokes of hash.
RT╔'s Play of the Week (RT╔ Radio 1, Tuesday) was less compelling and more characteristic of our State broadcaster's scatter-shot dramatic output. Time and Straw by Patricia O'Reilly starred Deirdre Monaghan as Eileen Grey, a designer of Anglo-Irish background who made her mark on bohemian Paris 80 years ago. Clever and erudite, it nonetheless never rose beyond a sense of being on a mission of historical retrieval, the earnest highlighting of the achievements of a significant Irishwoman whose reputation is unknown to most of us.
In other words, it probably should have been a documentary. Notwithstanding its framing device of a 1970s interview and its occasionally arty flashbacks, Time and Straw was rarely dramatic. It was pretty interesting, though, so no hard feelings from this quarter.
Jazz listeners in Dublin, especially those without BBC Radio 3 on cable, have had to be reliant of late on the moods of John Kelly and Donal Dineen taking a jazzy swing; on Lyric's tiny dedicated weekend slots; and on a handful of other marginally scheduled or community radio programmes.
Now, just in time for the arrival on BBC TV tonight of the much-anticipated Ken Burns Jazz documentary series - with its apparently rather narrow-minded definitions of the music - comes the return to piracy of Jazz FM.
Having blown a considerable wad on its failed bid for IRTC-sanctioned legitimacy, Jazz FM returns to 89.8FM somewhat slim-lined but with every intention of sticking around for a while (although presumably the various newly licensed stations will have something to say to the IRTC about that). And it comes with its old expansive definition of the sound, which it used to call "black" but now prefers to label "urban".
That means jazz of all sorts, but funk, soul, r&b, hip-hop, and some hot Latino and African music too.
Most weekdays, the station will broadcast (with great clarity around the city, it must be said) tracks played by its tasty but textureless Random Selecta machine; then, starting next Friday evening, it will devote the weekends to real-live music-loving DJs - and even a bit of public-service-minded chatter on a Sunday morning.
It certainly offers a niche-filling option. And sure, it'll give us somewhere to tune into until the recipient of the gen-you-ine radio licence, crossover-country station Star FM, starts its Shania-and Garth-a-thon later this year.