Radio Review: More stand-ins. It's quite disconcerting to turn on the radio these days because with some programmes you're never quite sure who will be presenting.
Some stations have a better subs bench than others but it's the choices that are confusing. The most peculiar has to be Marty Whelan sitting in for Gerry Ryan on RTÉ 2fm's morning show. There'd have to be something wrong with you if you didn't like Marty - what's not to like? - but isn't he a bit of the comfy slippers and cardie side of things to be heading up the flagship show on what's supposed to be the young people's station, a bit Farah slacks when Diesel straight legs are called for? The local stations around the country must be mopping up listeners who are turned off by Tubridy's relentless desire to be liked and confused by Whelan even being there in the first place.
At least Marty hasn't been engaging in the same sort of handbagging as Damien Kiberd on Newstalk's Breakfast Show. There has to be a rule somewhere that, just as you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, as a broadcaster you shouldn't be mean about the person you're temporarily replacing. Kiberd's been standing in for Eamon Dunphy this week and, whether it's ego, nerves or the first meow in a catfight, he's taken to reading out listeners' negative comments about Dunphy - and there have been quite a few of them - and also broadcasting the ones complimentary to himself.
That aside, he does have a very different style from Dunphy in that he at least attempts balance - something not usually in evidence on the station at that time of the morning. This was most obvious in the interview with Robert Fisk on Wednesday about the release of figures by The Iraq Body Count and the Oxford Research Group showing that 25,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the past two years. While Dunphy treats Fisk as if he's the Oracle, things were quite a bit more testy with Kiberd asking the questions. He referred to Fisk as a crusading journalist and was snappily contradicted by Fisk who disputed the "crusading " tag. If only to be a devil's advocate, Kiberd tried to pick apart the figures and he did manage to get a debate going.
Fisk painted a grim picture of his daily routine in Baghdad. Every morning he visits the four morgues in the city and every morning he says there are around 30 bodies. The newly released civilian death figures, he said, are the equivalent of a London bombing every hour.
On Five Seven Live (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) another veteran war reporter, the BBC's John Simpson, put into context how difficult it is to get an accurate picture about what is going on in the country. Travelling outside Baghdad is now almost impossible for foreign journalists. Not a man to put his own personal safety before a news story, he said that even he won't take a road trip outside the city - it's simply too dangerous. To get anywhere in Iraq he has to fly, usually in an American troop plane.
In Holy Pictures (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday) Gerry McArdle assembled a panel of film buffs for the first in a four-part series looking at the Bible according to Hollywood. Starting with Cecil B De Mille's 1956 epic The Ten Commandments and ending with the 1962 turkey Sodom and Gomorrah, it was an entertaining programme. "Why is it that you always knew what was going on in Sodom but never Gomorrah?" mused Donald Clarke who associated these epic movies with his childhood in Limerick when there was nothing else on the one-channel TV on a rainy Bank Holiday Monday. Ethicist Barry McMillan pointed out that it was too easy to take pot shots at these biblical epics because they're just "begging to be deconstructed and not just because of their kitsch camp quality, or the way the characters speak in a four-four time to convey the portentousness of it all". Dino De Laurentis's grand but totally risible epic The Bible was released in 1966 with publicity material that hammered home that the movie had taken five years to make, "Not the wisest selling point when the movie was showing what God could do in only seven days," remarked Clarke.
Another new series, this time a seven-part one, Body Parts (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) began this week and started by looking at how skin works. There were lots of gory details, from Everest climber Grania Willis's description of what happened when a climbing colleague fell victim to frostbite on his face ("a Sherpa peeled his skin off in one go, like the Turin shroud") to dermatologist Gillian Murphy who cheerfully pointed out that there were over 3,000 skin diseases.
It'll be interesting to see if presenter Tina Leonard shows the same lack of squeamishness when she decides which six other body parts to investigate.
