RadioReview:Coverage of the Northern Ireland Assembly agreement filled the news and current affairs programmes at the start of the week - though calls about the whole thing to the many phone-in shows were noticeably absent, usually a safe enough barometer of man-in-the-street interest.
TV news watchers at least had the visual distraction of Ian Paisley's fedora, Martin McGuinness's sharp selection of ties and that diamond-shaped table in Stormont - oh, the problems of getting a tablecloth - there's nothing quite like Northern politics for making your mind wander. There was no sense in any of the radio coverage of what, if anything, the ordinary people of Northern Ireland thought about it.
Despite the stalwart efforts of RTÉ reporter Tommie Gorman et al, there was the feeling of being constantly and urgently told how important the whole thing is, but receiving that message through a fuzzy remove - a bit like a trigonometry class. However, it's one thing when someone like me has a nothing-to-do-with-me attitude, I was slightly amazed to stumble upon the BBC's flagship news programme The World at One (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday) and not hear a single mention of Northern Ireland. So while it was still a lead item here on all stations, it had fallen off the news agenda for lunchtime listeners to the Beeb - surely a small but significant reflection of a different public's interest.
George Mitchell's measured analysis of events (Morning Ireland, RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) helped throw some light on the sense of public disconnection from Northern politics. As chairman of the talks leading to the Belfast Agreement - all of nine years ago - he said the "politicians have now caught up with the public". He didn't think it would have taken this long to get to this point or that there would have been as many setbacks. "There's no mistaking," he said, "this is a huge step forward." Times and circumstances have changed, he reiterated: "I think the public has been ahead of the politicians." He still visits the North and hopes the time will come when he can bring his two small children to listen to a debate in Stormont when the subjects for discussion will be the normal run-of-the-mill parliamentary stuff that has a real impact on people's lives, such as health and education.
Mention the words Kunta Kinte to anyone who spent any time in front of a telly in the 1970s and they'll say, with pop-quiz alacrity, "Roots". It was one of the first blockbuster TV drama series and just how important it was to the black community in Britain was explored in Roots (BBC Radio 4, Saturday).
It broke audience records, attracting 19 million viewers per episode and, according to presenter Kwame Kwei Armah, it changed the way a generation of Britons thought about slavery, the US and black history. Roots could so easily have been a ratings disaster - the main characters were black and the villains were white. This at a time when there had never been a mainstream series based around black characters. It prompted Londoner Kwame, now a successful actor and playwright, then a teenager, to go back to his own roots and change his name from Ian Roberts to one which he felt better fitted his heritage. "At last, Africans were shown not as savages and cannibals with bones through their noses, but as proud people with a strong cultural tradition."
This programme was part of a pan-BBC season to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. Another highlight of the series was Free at Last: The Beginning of the End of Slavery (BBC World Service, Monday), which explored the psychological legacy of slavery. Jamaican psychologist Frederick Hickling linked it to present-day violence among young black men. In the US, the new, politically correct term for slavery is "enslaved African".
A sure way to change prejudice is to put a human face to a label and while top Irish fashion designer Richard Lewis is, by his own admission, not a gay activist and campaigner, the interview he gave Marian Finucane (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday) must surely have succeeded in chipping away at any listener's homophobia. Lewis's business and life partner Jim Greeley died suddenly earlier this year - they'd been together 30 years, longer than most marriages. Finucane's at her best in these sorts of interviews, drawing out the story without mawkishness or sensationalism, just kindness and pure human interest. Lewis's description of his life with Greeley was uplifting, and his sense of profound grief was deeply moving.
