RADIO REVIEW:IF PRESENTER Rachael English and producer Aonghus McAnally rifled through every single one of the 13,000 Boxes (RTÉ Radio One, Thursday) of the 2006 census, they'd need more than a six-part series. But, at times, it felt like they did, writes Quentin Fottrell.
This programme was unapologetically, all-embracingly earnest. That word should set off the alarm bells and have you running screaming for the exit, trampling the statisticians and leaping over the boxes of questionnaires. 13,000 Boxes was like a military tour of duty for the state broadcaster.
I imagined English in RTÉ fatigues, with dates of birth, ticked boxes and question marks as camouflage, valiantly stomping through this impossible obstacle course.
It started at Mary Mother of Hope National School in Littlepace, Blanchardstown and ended in Leitrim, which has stopped its 150-year haemorrhage of residents, and included a detour to a warehouse in Swords to chat with some statisticians.
Dublin 15 has experienced "white flight" as immigrants move into rentals, but the census doesn't examine the reasons: the nice immigrant family who moved in next door or lack of services and facilities? "In our first year we had these little exotic things called non-nationals and people would come in and nearly pet them, because they'd never seen Muslim children from the Sudan before," Mary Mother of Hope's Principal Enda McGorman said.
In 2001, his school had 55 pupils; now it has about 800. McGorman sounded enlivened by the multicultural challenge and said the Department of Education's response to lack of support for its growing pains was "regrettably very poor".
Dublin 15 has 90,000 residents, the same for Sligo and Leitrim combined. MBNA, the American credit card company, is one of Leitrim's major employers, which tells you more than those boxes ever could about the way we live.
People are moving back there for the low cost of living, and Joe Gilhooly of Leitrim County Development Board brushed off the fact that Leitrim always getts a bad rap, saying, "All publicity is good publicity."
On Wednesday's Moncrieff (Newstalk, weekdays) Sean Moncrieff interviewed Sam Costello about his bridal boot camp in Galloway, Scotland. This item was tailor-made for him and, I guess, plucked from Monday's Daily Telegraph.
The army aspect is a draw for the blushing, sweating brides-to-be. Costello said, "They're up at zero-five-forty-five to be ready at zero-six-hundred." But his tough 24-hour military clock malfunctioned: "And they go to sleep at eight o'clock."
In a last-ditch effort to shed a dress size before the big day, the women go mountain biking, practise yoga, indulge in light boxing and swim in freezing cold waters under the supervision of instructors trained in survival and self-defence.
Moncrieff asked if this was "the last chance saloon" to fit into their wedding dresses. Costello said most lose a dress size if not two. "It's an impressive claim," Moncrieff added. That was mud in Costello's eye.
The image of these latter-day Private Benjamins being put through their paces begged wider questions about what drives them to drop a clothing size. It costs £1,650 for one week with a private room. For that, they could buy a new dress.
Still, I got the feeling that Moncrieff was hiding more sceptical feelings and I wish he'd pushed it. He finally asked Costello if he gets any wedding invites. He doesn't. "I'm not a huge wedding fan," Costello said, "so I'm not too upset."
Like Moncrieff, Star Trek's Spock must also tread that fine cultural line between emotion/entertainment and intellectual curiosity. Actually, if Spock smiled and had less hair, with his cute pixie ears he'd be a dead ringer for Moncrieff.
On the US National Public Radio's Weekend Edition (NPR.org, Sunday), Neda Ulaby said Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock, supports Barack Obama, yet another pixie-eared man who must balance the visceral and a keen intellect.
"It's a struggle we all face," Henry Jenkins, humanities professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Ulaby.
"Are we driven by our emotion or by our intellect? And how do we reconcile those two things?" Here's another upside to Obama's Spock-like elitist appeal: Jenkins said that, like many men, Spock "represses outward signs of emotion" and, although he withholds his feelings, seems "sensitive, sensuous at certain times".
"Spock is sexy for a large number of people, male and female. Many of the female fans I studied really are attracted to the emotional depths of this character."
Just like Obama, Spock entered the public domain at a turbulent moment in history, during the Vietnam War and the feminist movement, so Jenkins sees Spockama as a unifying force in a divided American society.
"And he's indebted to the Vulcan philosophy of infinite diversity and infinite combination," Jenkins added.
"Someone who is of mixed race is seen as being capable of understanding both races." I'll buy that. Obama and Spock: bridges over still waters.
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