RADIO REVIEW/Harry Browne: The rumour that Gay Byrne was coming back to RTÉ to do a weekly light-music show was still buzzing in my ears when suddenly last weekend there was the honey-voiced man himself on the radio
There was no time to fortify my stomach for 50 minutes of Gaybo's favoured tunes. I had a stack of Bruce Springsteen CDs waiting to blast the house in advance of that night's gig - could any column be worth that sort of Saturday sacrifice? I'd catch the cleverly titled Gaybo (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday) later, on the Internet archive.
It seems I wasn't the only one caught on the hop. The good folks who run Radio 1's ever more efficient website didn't seem to know anything about Gaybo: to find the programme archived I had to follow links through the Brendan Balfe show it replaced. This was still the case on Thursday, five days after the inaugural Gaybo broadcast. Still, if you looked carefully, there was Gaybo, digitally encoded, albeit in Balfean disguise, and with his erstwhile glory in tatters.
Why on earth have we - and he - been afflicted with this programme? On the evidence of this show, RTÉ should learn to let go, and so should Byrne. There was precious little here to attract an audience to however many megahertz. The small consolation that at least Radio 1 is continuing to look after an older "demographic" stops being so consoling when you realise this is among the patronising best it thinks it can do for the over-50s.
The show started almost promisingly, with Byrne moaning and rambling in mock bad temper about the degeneration of standards reflected in his show's title: "I'll give them Gaybo . . ."
The first song he played was a clever enough pick too: Dionne Warwick's What Goes Around.
The music slipped south from there, with consistently flaccid tracks from great American artists of yore: Durante, Hope and Crosby, Sinatra, Presley, and so on.
But the few minutes of talk between tunes was worse, far worse. Someone appears to have forgotten that on weekday morning radio Byrne had a team of clever boys and girls busily scripting his witty wee takes on last night's football and what's in the Daily Express. Perhaps producer Balfe is offering some assistance here - such as unearthing the strange Eamonn Andrews chat about Presley from the vague "late Fifties/early Sixties" - but really weekend radio is always far more DIY. Byrne offered a succession of stingless tales that were all-too-credibly his own, about getting lost in a Spanish parking garage or interviewing Bob Hope on the Late Late.
Many of the stories centred on Byrne's own history, talent and/or celebrity. One that didn't was nonetheless revealing about his sense of stardom: en route to playing a dreadful live version by Paul McCartney of Here, There and Everywhere, Byrne repeated a profoundly unfunny story McCartney told on stage last week about a Japanese hotel masseuse who annoyed him by warbling Yesterday as she worked her way down his arm.
Personally, non-star that I am, I reckoned McCartney was (a) getting in a dig at a Japanese woman without naming the enemy who fits that description, and (b) complaining about the way people insist on inserting their own enthusiastic personalities into what should be anonymous service transactions. Byrne, who has presumably been there and done that, clearly sympathised and found Paul's lament hilarious.
But sure, all is not lost - not so long as Radio 1 is also prepared to give a prime-time summer slot to works of gen-u-ine radio such as Mícheál Holmes's series of documentaries about work, Just the Job (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday).
With its easy pace and warm feel for ordinary people, this probably targets an older audience too, but its sense of the texture of real life is a far cry from Byrne's soliloquies.
This week's "just the jobber" was Patsy O'Hagan, who runs a mobile grocery in Ardboe, Co Tyrone. There were lovely little aural details, such as the sound of paper being crushed as Patsy "filed" an invoice.
But this piece thrived especially on the dialogue, the softly savage slagging as O'Hagan went about his day's business with suppliers and customers. Is there any sound more distinctly Irish?
Older voices - more serious, Kerry-accented - also populated Colm Keane's bank holiday documentary, The Hungry Thirties (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday). Poverty in the 1930s may not seem so distinctly Irish, what with the Depression happening everywhere else as well.
Anyway, here the "Hungry Thirties" was the bit that came between the hungry 1920s and the hungry 1940s, right?
This simple, fascinating programme underlined the severe and specific consequences of that decade's "economic war", when certain commodities disappeared from Co Kerry, along with most of the money and, eventually, many of the people.