Politics as usual? Not on the radio it's not. This spring's general-election campaign promises to be something just a little bit different.
It's not just on Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), where the presenter continues his alphabetical plod through the outgoing Dáil with grim determination - denying himself even the relative levity of referendum-results night, when John Bowman took the chair in Browne's stead. I must admit, at risk of underlining my already-ample nerd credentials, that the programme's comprehensive review of TDs' performances has grown on me, to the point where I now immediately recognise the names of the hard-working committees as opposed to the cosy sinecures - before researcher Jonathan Doyle has even reminded Vincent how often the lads have met during this Dáil.
Browne's interviews with the TDs, mainly tolerant with more obscure backbenchers, take on a particularly grim mien when he talks to some of the bigger guns. During this week's Dublin South-East review, Ruairí Quinn may have been at pains to point out that Bertie Ahern is not his drinking buddy - "he's a conservative nationalist, I'm a socialist" ("heh heh," I didn't quite hear him add) - but Browne himself seemed even more determined to banish any taint of amiability from his questioning of Quinn. Any time the latter tried to introduce a convivial, chortling, "now Vincent, we've been over this before" tone to the proceedings, Browne unflinchingly, almost monotonously jammed another awkward question down Quinn's throat.
Browne's talk-to-the-TDs exercise, while novel, is nonetheless in the mould of traditional Irish political journalism, complete with efforts at impartiality, and is obviously directed at a relatively narrow audience of politics junkies. Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday) is a different story, and Ryan enters this election season with his tail up and confident of his mastery of the electorate and its concerns.
'WHEN the politicians come knocking at your door over the coming weeks," Gerry instructed us on Wednesday morning, hours before the A&E strike, "tell them you support the nurses". Admittedly, as demagoguery goes this is pretty easy populist stuff - I don't think Gerry would dare suggest we barrack our TDs in support of the ASTI teachers, for example. All the same, this isn't State broadcasting according to the Reithian model either. For three hours every weekday morning from now until polling day, one of RTÉ's most popular presenters apparently feels qualified to make direct and partial interventions in the campaign on matters of public concern.
Fair enough. The more these guys keep their biases out where we can see them, the better we can assess what they're spinning us.
And RTÉ enters this election with, for the first time, significant Statewide competition from a commercial broadcaster, whose flagship current-affairs programme definitely wears its populist political heart on its sleeve. Will The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) make the sort of impact that local commercial radio has done in previous elections? Hearing Matt Cooper, filling in for Eamon Dunphy, interviewing - long and easy - one of the Sinnot-inspired disabled-rights candidates this week, one suddenly saw what for the Government must be an "appalling vista": a credible and influential current-affairs programme that makes it its business to support chosen protest movements, even during an election campaign, and just as disproportionately as it feels like.
This tendency will of course be at odds with Dunphy's own soft-spot for Bertie and Fianna Fáil, and in itself it has the capacity to hurt other leaders and parties too; whatever emerges should - as Eamon himself might drawl - "make for fascinating listening".
Michael O'Kane's documentary Referendum (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) might have been an interesting reflection on the media's impact on ordinary young voters in recent weeks. It wasn't really. O'Kane interviewed two women, aged 19 and 20, one pro-choice, one anti-abortion, during the weeks leading up to March 6th, then stuck some funny music between the clips. Not especially intimate, it was like an over-extended version of oft-heard talk-radio debates of limited articulacy, with the weirdest segment coming courtesy of pro-lifer Mairead: "It wasn't the baby's fault, thus you can't kill that baby, you can't punish that baby for something he didn't do. Its father did it . . . Its father did that to the mother. Its father was the evil person in this situation." At which inopportune moment, Mairead's boyfriend Johnny knocked on the window.
Ireland, of course, exports more than just unwanted foetuses. One of our more remarkable and altogether more positive shipments abroad is a Limerick lad who nine years ago, as a postgrad-in-exile, produced a stunning book that is, believe it or not, a definitive verbal and visual distillation of the Los Angeles rap scene, It's Not About a Salary, in essays, photographs and interviews. Imagine my excitement when I got a spam e-mail saying that author Brian Cross, now a film-maker known, in hiphoppy fashion, as B+, was being interviewed this week on The Blend, a programme on the college radio station DCU-FM, at Dublin City University.
Now, I live in "Dublin city", so even though DCU is a little way out on the northside and I'm behind the brewery, I thought I had a shot at picking up the station in the evening at 97.3FM. Instead, around that spot on the dial I heard CKR - none of those letters stands for "Dublin", so far as I know - and FM104 - none of those numbers looks like 97.3, by my count. These stations were playing rap music all right, only with a "C" in front of "rap", and they certainly weren't interviewing Brian Cross.
So I don't know if Cross is as interesting as ever about race and culture. I think it's safe to predict, however, that he's more astute than part 1 of A Beginner's Guide to the Blues (BBC Radio 2, Wednesday), in which presenter Paul Jones (from Manfred Mann) threw in the standard "from its origins in slavery" line near the start, then never again mentioned race.
Don't get me wrong. The Muddy Waters music was cool (as was a too-short excerpt from Led Zep's You Shook Me) and Jones was cute.
The blues, he said, had been "an inspiration for countless musicians, not least myself. Well, perhaps 'least'." (Ah, go on Paul.) And I, a bit of a beginner I s'pose, never knew Muddy had been a Venetian-blind salesman in Chicago. But even when Jones told a good anecdote he didn't seem to sense its significance. Goodbye Newport Blues, for example, was an on-the-spot improvisation by the Waters band based on a lyric just handed to them by Langston Hughes. It's hard to imagine a similar crashing of high-low boundaries in white-American culture - Allen Ginsberg and the imported Clash spring to mind, but little else of this level of unself-consciousness. It's as if Don DeLillo were hanging out with the E Street Band and scratching a few lines for Bruce to play with.
Jones eventually got to describing the 1960 British-blues invasion of the US mass market, and blithely quoted Muddy Waters as saying: "It took the people from England to hit my people". And if there were any layers and ironies lurking in the last three words of that quotation, Jones didn't appear to notice.