There's not a lot wrong with Marian Finucane. Really. She's got the voice, the manner, the warmth and the alert curiosity of a sound radio presenter. She's got one of the largest audiences in Irish radio, notwithstanding the latest slippage in her listening figures. She's got the goodwill of the vast majority of people, who are prepared to overlook the occasional gaps in knowledge and flaps in syntax to which she is prone.
What she hasn't got is a programme that does her justice. Marian Finucane (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) has been, for most of its relatively short history, a pretty dire hour's listening, a show that raises more questions than it answers - chief among those questions being "Why?" and "Ya wha'?" Brenda Power was filling in for Marian this week, yet another case of the creeping colonisation of the airwaves by newspaper journalists (long may it last). She's fine - arguably even a slightly weak version of the kick in the arse the programme requires. Perhaps, as a feature writer, Power has an instinctive sense of how to walk through a potentially complex story, and her interviews have the shape that Marian's too often lack.
Finucane is terrific dealing with the focused, straightforward narratives and arguments that are the stuff of Liveline. But get someone in the studio or on the phone with a bit of a life-story to tell, and odds are it will emerge awkward, roundabout, arse-backways even. Unfortunately, they make her do this sort of thing an awful lot.
Marian's autumn Joe Jacob interview was a gem thanks primarily to a simple conceit - the stopwatch running after a putative Sellafield plane crash - which the presenter stuck to, with just-audible wit and an unflappability to contrast with the poor panicking politician.
Many of her other interviews could do with a stopwatch too, but for a very different reason: someone needs to shout "Stop!" after the first five aimless minutes.
We shouldn't be too harsh; the programme has an astonishing audience for such a short show. The 55-minute length, however, is a big part of Marian Finucane's problem - listeners don't feel a particular show is going to recover from, say, a turgid first item (lots of them, aren't there?). It lacks the pace and variety to make us feel, yes, I'll stick with this, even though this item isn't my cuppa, because at least it'll be bright and breezy and the next one up will probably be better. We're more likely to think, jayzus, even Ian Dempsey would be preferable to this. And by the time we switch back, it's time for Pat Kenny.
And no, it's not all about Marian. Idiosyncratic would be a kind word for the programme's selection of stories - much of the time you can drop the "syncra" from the middle of that word. A show that should be agenda-setting too often sounds like it picked up its agenda either from last week's Morning Ireland or from the crankiest of crank-calls.
Enough already. The best of us are prone to a slump and there's nothing wrong with Marian Finucane that the radio-heads don't know and can't do something about. As usual, we in the media are probably reading rather too much into relatively trivial declines in the show's JNLR figures.
Meanwhile, for years this column has been mocking Today FM for boasting about relatively trivial rises in its own figures.
This week it boasted yet another one, and frankly, it must be said, the station's series of trivial rises has consolidated into a definite trend. I would still maintain that Today's daytime programming is basically rubbish. I would insist that it makes a mockery of the words "independent" and "national" to apply them to a business that is in the process of being turned over in its entirety to a foreign media company. (What say we redesignate RTÉ as the "independent national" broadcaster?) But I have to admit, Scottish Radio Holdings is getting what's shaping up as a sound little earner for its pounds sterling - whether or not it hangs on to Ireland's campest lad, Eamon Dunphy.
If it's big Q quality you're looking for, there's always the BBC. With Beeby indifference to the ecclesiastical calendar, it scheduled Pentecost (BBC Radio 3, Sunday) before we'd even got to Lent, but I doubt listeners were complaining. The timing was right in other ways; hot on the heels of two TV dramas that dealt with the very public events of Derry in 1972, this was Stewart Parker's exploration of a more private side of the 1974 Ulster Workers' Council strike in Belfast.
Parker wrote the play's lead roles - mercilessly bickering Lenny and Marian - with Stephen Rea and Frances Tomelty in mind, but this BBC production, 14 years after the playwright's death, marks the first time these two estimable actors have actually played the roles together. With Laura Hughes and Adrian Dunbar as the friends with whom they shelter on the peace line, and Valerie Lilley as the dead, old woman whose house they occupy, it's an impressive cast all round.
Impressive play, too, with characters who, inevitably, speechify all too freely, but who are tangible characters all the same. In a review, it's easier to quote some great speechifying than to transmit that tangibility: "It's what I'm good at, isn't it, as you were at pains to point out - trading, buying and selling," declaims antiques-dealer Marian to Lenny, very early on. "I don't have to love it, just get on with it. Survival. It's one bloody useful knack, knowing the value of things to people, what they'll pay, what they'll think they're worth - the things that is. The people of course are not worth shit. I didn't have to love them either. You and I tend to diverge on that point, you having all that deep-seeded compassion for anything that snuffles into your shoulder . . . In my case the embattled bourgeoisie of Belfast was one long procession of avaricious gobshites, hell-bent on overloading their lounge cabinets with any bauble or knickknack, as long as it looked like it cost more than it did, as long as it was showy enough to advertise their grandeur, and their fashionable taste and stylishness, not to mention their absolutely bottomless vulgarity. It was bad enough before the shooting match started, it's grotesque at this point."
Phew. Amazingly, we like this very un-RTÉ Marian. She's hard on Lenny, and tough on the old bourgeoisie too, but she tries to be terribly nice to the ghost of Lily Matthews. Lily is the Protestant widow who has recently died in her house, and she is none too pleased to see an "idolator", and a separated one at that, taking her place. But Marian hasn't moved so much as one of Lily's Coronation souvenirs: "I've brought nothing with me, see - no Sacred Hearts, no holy water, not even a statue of yer woman". Pentecost is funny, complete with trombone breaks, but a comedy it ain't. There's all sorts of history and politics percolating around here - personal, sectarian, gender, the works. It's riveting, and while I understand the grief of radio-lovers who want to hear radio-plays, not stage-plays with the lights turned off, I'll definitely make an exception for this one: its dark, brooding Belfast nights, its prim ghost, its head games, are all perfect radio material, and Tomelty is completely and utterly amazing. Maybe Marian could learn something.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie