Well, there's drama, and there's drama. The last RTE drama department outing - I use the term advisedly - that I heard was a week or two back, a hijack farce (yes) called The Deadly Men of Flight 102.
With a cast of many, boisterously directed by Daniel Reardon and revelling in the new digital studio in Montrose, this sounded like great fun entirely, a chance for the denizens of the soon-to-be-departed Konvenience Korner to try out some variations on the Dublin accent for future reference. It was also, not to be too snooty about the thing, absolutely appalling.
Sure, there's room for argument about a place in the schedule for lightweight, populist plays. But it's hardly necessary to employ intellectually challenged material like this - the title's pun on the initial attractiveness and ultimate danger of the Spanish hijackers was the best joke on offer - in RTE Radio 1's Tuesday-evening drama slot.
Putting on something like The Deadly Men of Flight 102 - a play potentially aimed at a mass audience if it were halfway good - when the actual listenership is anything but massive is also typical of the aimlessness that has beset drama output at RTE. Hopefully the new story slot in Carrie Crowley's programme from January will help provide a map.
BBC Radio 3 can hardly be accused of such uncertainty. There, wedged among the operas and documentaries of its weekend programming, was Troy, Andrew Rissik's new trilogy re-telling the elemental stories of Helen and Paris, Achilles and Hector, Agamemnon, Klytemnestra and the rest. Rissik's collaborators - Homer, Aeschuylus etc - may have been mass entertainers in their day, but Troy made few concessions to late-20th-century popular drama.
No, this was good British actors - including Paul Scofield, Saeed Jaffrey and Geraldine Somerville - confidently claiming these Mediterranean treasures as their own, in the tradition that stretches from Shakespeare through Elgin to countless South Bank productions of the ancient classics. Rissik is a minor but worthy heir, penning familiar-sounding, majestic long speeches that captured the contemporary resonances of characters like Orestes and Menelaos without trivialising them.
Lindsay Duncan's monologue as Klytemnestra awaiting, with murderous intent, the return of Agamemnon must have lasted nearly 10 minutes. It was so perfect, such a rallying cry for betrayed womanhood, and spoken so insinuatingly, that it could have lasted three times as long without ill-effect. Rissik's glib epilogue about our reasons for re-telling legends - like dreams, "they tell us what we need to know" seemingly - was mercifully short, and his variations on familiar themes and strands of the story were suitably intriguing. The overall effect was satisfying; some moments achieved far higher heights.
My walkman at last gave up the ghost last week, so for two or three days, until I had the cash in hand to replace it, I walked through the world unaccustomedly hearing life unmediated by Marian or Gay, Eamon or Adrian. Most of it, from the kids' voices in the park to the multilingual buzz of Iskander's kebab house on Dame Street, sounded wonderful. Some of it corresponded reasonably well with what radio tells me; some of it was shockingly unfamiliar.
In the latter category was the trio of heroin addicts I sat among on a bus one evening. While a young woman quietly savoured the contents of a plastic methadone bottle, the two men talked to each other quietly, openly about their struggle - one that's too often conducted in the teeth of opposition from counsellors and medical professionals. Their stories of treatment routines arbitrarily changed, of personal confidences casually abused, of completely unnecessary deaths, rang too true. Sure, we hear some of this on the air; but generally the addicts who speak to Joe Duffy, Vincent Browne, even Chris Barry, are in, or hoping to be in, treatment programmes. Any criticism of their doctors or counsellors would hardly be likely to go down too well - and from what I heard on the bus, could have devastating consequences.
Of course, where resources are too scarce, professionals are going to find themselves "playing God", as one of the addicts said. That's one reason I was glad, once I'd plugged up my ears again and regained the safety of radioland, to hear that Eamon Dunphy on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) is still livid about the state of the health service.
For some reason, however, the last time I heard his weekly review panel going on about the subject, Dunphy and Kevin Myers found it apposite to deride "crusaders" such as Noel Browne. They were happy, in this case, to parrot the pols' apologia about politics being "the art of the possible". Tell it to the TB survivors.
More like "the art of [convincing] the [people how little is] possible", wouldn't you say, lads?
