It was the most long-awaited performance of the summer, and it didn't disappoint. According to Vincent Browne, Ray Burke himself wanted to know who would be portraying him in the tribunal re-enactments on Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday); it was, of course, none other than the living legend himself, Joe Taylor.
If you think this column is trivialising the important tribunal business by focusing on the theatrical re-creation of it, you probably weren't listening to the programme. Browne has made Taylor the star of the show, lining up his panel - the supporting cast, at this stage - to enthuse about his mimicry. Browne even, on Wednesday, challenged Ray Burke ("I know you're listening, Ray") to phone in and match his own voice against Taylor's version of it.
Katie Hannon's insistence that Taylor was not being over-effusive in his interpretation of Burke's testimony was reassuring, and also increasingly beside the point. Taylor's characterisations - of Ben Dunne's blunt, slightly dumb credibility; of James Gogarty's doddering, slightly wavering integrity; of Justice Flood's prissy irritability; and now of Burke's blustering Rambonics - will be the nation's memory of these tribunals, and of the men at Taylor's mercy.
Due to circumstances beyond Taylor's control, this latest tour de force has come rather late in the year, as summer finally warms up and the radio hops reflexively to music programmes. John Kelly's Mystery Train kept us at Radio 1 on Tuesday for a little chat with Al Green. "A world without happiness would be a miserable world" may not be philosophy worthy of the Sorbonne, but when it's Green segueing into his own Love and Happiness, who cares?
Today FM's River of Soul (Today FM, Sunday) saw Karl Tsigdinos counting the WLJB Fast 30 from July 1968 - that is, the black-music hits from a big Detroit station. The songs, together with ads and other clips from the time, seemed to be Tsigdinos making a point about the endurance of US innocence, even in that season of riots and assassinations. Only the number-one track, Stevie Wonder's You've Met your Match in Me, carried a (debatable) hint of radical politics in the incendiary pun of the title. Then there was the conservative sexual politics of Betty Wright's Girls Can't Do what the Guys Do and the hippy-dippy lovin' stuff of the Fifth Dimension's Stone Soul Picnic. It was an interesting, illusion-shattering exercise.
There's more consistently high musical quality coming from an essentially new station, one that only went full-time on May 1st and plays the sort of music you just don't hear elsewhere.
No, not Lyric FM, but Raidio na Gaeltachta; I'm thoroughly unqualified to comment on its speech output - though I love listening to Cathal Mac Coille in any language - but the new evening programme, An Taobh Tuathail, plays some of the hippest-sounding tracks anywhere on the wireless, and the day's schedule is liberally sprinkled with excellent trad.
Instant, all-encompassing expertise is such a fixture of the journalistic mindset that most of the time we don't even notice ourselves that we're spoofing. I'm not speaking for any of my esteemed colleagues, of course; however, the list of topics about which I've implied greater, deeper knowledge than what that which was actually at my disposal makes a tidy little volume, ranging from movies and politics to sport, various genres of music (see above) to - gulp - radio itself.
However, one subject to which I claim wholly legitimate spouter's rights, with the help of seven years' steady bedtime exposure, is the work of Shirley Hughes, the incomparable English children's illustrator and author.
About the woman herself I knew nothing, until With Great Pleasure (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday). Turns out she's perfectly nice, perfectly intelligent, too-perfectly Radio 4. Hughes's accent betrays little of her Wirral origins, and her taste, as reflected in her selected clips, ranges ever-so-nicely from Renaissance cathedrals to music halls, from a Shakespeare sonnet to dialogue from The Thin Man - as heard in childhood visits to the cinema during the Blitz, when the sirens would go and the projectionist would play the main feature over and over until the all-clear. Her real passion came through when she talked about the drama in her work, the relationship between illustrating narrative and acting. The same little girls who've made me an expert on Shirley Hughes have got me listening with more than the minimum interest for Anna Livia's Move Over Einstein (Tuesday and Thursday), a series of six programmes about the contributions of Irish women scientists of the past. (Not that the girls could be bothered; the only speech-radio they seriously attended to this week were details of the Posh-Becks wedding.)
The series explicitly builds on the vital work of reclamation contained in a recent book from Women in Technology and Science (WITS), Stars, Shells and Bluebells. Tuesday's programme started out as appreciation of the contribution to botany made by Matilda Knowles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then happily switched midway into to a stream-of-consciousness monologue from botanist, and established radio star, Dr Eanna Ni Lamhna.
"To trace the roots of today's problems and challenges in the scientific world facing women, one must first turn to history," the programme narrator says, but there's no sign in the documentary of any obstacles to Knowles's lichen research more substantial than stones in the cliff path at Howth where she explored for years. Still, role models are well and good, though I can't see my daughters immediately grasping the relevance to their lives of a posh - but not particularly spicey - Antrim lady pulling tiny plants from their rocky niches.
Dr Ni Lamhna provided useful context about the drop-everything-and-go nature of much botanical field research, with the implication that this is more unsuitable to women than men. For herself, as a self-employed consultant, she manages to poke around the plant life on sand dunes while the kids make do with a bucket and spade on the adjacent beach.