Where does the time go? It seems just yesterday (okay, last Tuesday) this column was gently slagging the title of From Brussels to Belmullet (RTE Radio 1, Monday) in advance of its first broadcast.
Next thing I know, the programme is gone, finished, all 10-part-seriesed out, and not a word written about it. In mitigation of my omission, I could point out that Monday afternoon is, ahem, a bit of a down time in the listening life of a Tuesday radio columnist, what with the copy filed a mere hours earlier.
There's also the small matter of my mild Euro-scepticism (nonTory strain), but that's particularly no excuse: Roisin Boyd's programme was not a fountain sprinkling innocent passers-by with moist Europhilia, not a naive we're-all-Europeans-now exercise, not the place to hear the sort of boosterism for EU institutions that's commonplace in other programming. In as much as I heard it, and based on reports from my many scouts, this was issue-oriented journalism with a good taste for conflict.
Fortunately, Boyd scarcely needs this space to advertise her skills as a reporter. Still more people got a taste of them when last week's final programme lured Padraig Flynn out of his relative silence and subjected him to Boyd's solid, informed and persistent questioning about that infamous contribution and the fallout from it.
The show's general topic was "how they see us", and it seems that Pee and company have largely maintained the Brussels perception of Irish charm and wit, even to the point of it sounding like a patronising stereotype. (So far, we've had the last laugh.)
Monday's 3.30 p.m. slot now switches to the consummate RTE pro, Colm Keane, with his amusing and useful Tricks of the Trade. I thought of Keane on Friday evening, and of his mafia-free profile of Engelbert Humperdinck, while I listened to People Get Ready (RTE Radio 1) - with Joe Jackson fearlessly putting the mob question directly to Tony Bennett.
What's more, he got a fairly straight answer. Yes, in the early days, an Italian guy called Antonio Bennedetti from Astoria, Queens, needed to offer a little something to local organised crime to ease his way out of the neighbourhood. That was scarcely going to faze Jackson, who revels in the complex, grimy details of show business, of life, and who offered ample musical reason to invite Bennett aboard the millennium train that's the rather silly conceit of this otherwise irresistible series.
What with Jackson making the case for Bennett as a great artist of jazz and pop, and Michael Colgan rather oddly eulogising Samuel Beckett as the literary giant of the next century in The Giant at My Shoulder (RTE Radio 1), Friday evening was one for casting one's mind back 40-odd years.
Indeed, the fin de siecle seems to be conspiring to redefine the once-despised 1950s as the artistic (or at least the Artist's) pinnacle of the 20th century, what with Jackson Pollock hopelessly reproduced all over our newspapers - and articles about John Coltrane and Miles Davis suddenly appearing (oh look, there's a lovely one now). Colgan's chat about Beckett was unremarkable, the stuff of a thousand Beckett Festival interviews - reinforcing Dublin's claim on the writer, highlighting his humour, recalling his humanity. "Champion of the dispossessed" seems a little strong, but Colgan wasn't called upon to justify such epithets, just to spout them.
Happily the programme was liberally padded with Beckett's own more precise language, as read beautifully by Barry McGovern, Susan Fitzgerald and David Kelly.
What would Beckett have made of this: "They've put it on over the media that they don't walk Portadown. That is a complete lie: they do walk Portadown as well as we walk Portadown."
That phrasemaking featured in a report on The Way It Is, Today FM's lunchtime news programme. These two or three minutes of the latest from the Drumcree standoff were unusual not for the passions and arguments exchanged, but because all the angry and hurt voices were those of women - among them not only the loyalist woman quoted above but nationalist women expressing fear for their children.
For some reason, it was exceptionally bleak - leaving Endgame in the ha'penny place, in fact.
