It would be as silly to condemn Marian Finucane (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) after an awkward week as it was to adore it after a compelling first day.
However, the drama promised by that Monday programme - and by those annoying strings in the signature tune - conspicuously failed to rematerialise all week. Liveline- type rows about Bertie Ahern's private life, or sub-Gaybo stuff about folks giving up the fags, hardly matched up. You can't help but wonder if there's more drama going on behind the scenes. The "human interest" bias of Finucane's programme was supposed to free up Today with Pat Kenny (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) to be more news-oriented. So why were stories such as Tusker Rock and, yesterday, the Margaret Cook fallout being comprehensively covered by the earlier show? No doubt Pat and his producers would like to know.
Finucane is an excellent broadcaster who, with her team, is likely to come up eventually with a reasonable formula for a programme which so far is an unsettled amalgam of familiar elements. (And the "Good afternoons" will pass too.) Whether it will fit into the larger schedule is, well, a larger question.
Then there's the stuff on the relatively outer reaches of the schedule. John Kelly doesn't sound as uncomfortable with his move as Marian does - his longer programme on Today FM was probably a strain to sustain - but the end of his new one-hour show does seem to rush up on him.
And Kelly also faces the vexed question of whether he's still cool. Perhaps having found how hard it is to maintain a Dublin celeb lifestyle on a DJ's salary plus regular Irish Times scribblings (I could have warned him), the Fermanagh man has riskily become the advertising voice of a pension plan. Anyway, having established his long-term financial security, Kelly puts his roots-music cred right on the line with the title of his new programme, which leaves the frivolity of The Eclectic Ballroom behind and sets out for realms of higher seriousness. The Mystery Train (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) mysteriously adds the definite article to the name of that beautiful, seminal track from Elvis Presley's Sun Sessions; Mystery Train is also the title of Greil Marcus's equally seminal book, which helped raise (?) criticism of popular music and its history to academic standards.
In other words, if you're gonna dance to Kelly's show, do it thoughtfully. Before this turns too smirky, let me hasten to add that I love it. Like The Eclectic Ballroom before it, The Mystery Train performs the most valuable of all public services: turning people on to new pleasures. And Kelly knows quite a few. Joe Jackson's Friday-night contribution to a nation's collective musical knowledge must await another column, but a new Sunday evening pleasure should be acknowledged before it disappears: Goosebumps and Tingles is a new, lamentably only-four-part series from talented young producer Sheila O'Callaghan.
You'd have your doubts about a show that presents someone else's favourite thrills - the promise of shared excitement could so easily turn into a series of boring and impenetrable yarns. But this week's offering, which featured archaeologist Seamus Caulfield, certainly didn't succumb: instead, tightly edited and with imaginative audio interventions, it was consistently fascinating.
In effect, imagine Desert Island Discs or Two for the Show without the small talk, boiled down to the subject's emotional core, and with more than music to illustrate it. Thus, when Caulfield remembered attending the 1948 All-Ireland semi-final, having never before "seen" any match except via Radio Eireann, we heard Micheal O'Hehir's voice from that era.
And when Caulfield talked of the thrill of archaeological discovery in his native Belderrig, Co Mayo, and began to remember the poem Seamus Heaney sent his father to commemorate the ancient finds, Caulfield's voice faded out and we heard the poet reading the work. Goosebumps and tingles? Maybe. Certainly the pleasure of sweetly crafted radio.
It's churlish to complain about John Kelly's gig advertising pensions when Five Seven Live (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) last week became an unwitting vehicle for a weapons plug.
It happened as news was breaking of the latest US v Iraq firefight. Myles Dungan talked to a reporter, on an American aircraft carrier, who was newly released from the military's eight-hour embargo on the information. As the reporter spoke, it became clear what he'd been doing for the eight hours: he was a bottomless mine of information about the name, cost and capacities of the Hughes air-to-air missile fired - for the first time - in the incident, and about little else.
It's well known that weapon companies regard the Gulf as a big TV studio to show the world what their stuff can do; it's a shame when even radio journalists present their PR bumf as if it were news.
