Radio Review:The radio was blaring in a taxi I took on Saturday, and when the news came on with updates of the "gang-related" shooting of two men in Walkinstown, the driver started up a well-practised rant about gun crime "in this town" and his theory that the police should stay out of it and let all "those scumbags wipe each other out".
As it's always intensely wearying to agree or disagree in these situations I said nothing, but on Monday I wondered if that taxi man was tuned into the News at One (RTÉ Radio 1) and if what he heard might just change his mind.
In a short, but truly haunting interview, Jodie Ward talked about the evening of the shooting, when her husband, Edward Ward, an innocent man, died because he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her barely suppressed wail was the sound of raw heartbreak, and what made her story all the more poignant was the very ordinariness of the evening she described.
"My husband kissed me. Brian [ Downes] came back. He was talking for a while. [ Downes's] kids were in the house, I could see them. I asked them their names and their ages and they told me. We were laughing and joking. I got cold and I said to my husband, 'I'll wait in the car', because we were about an hour there. I said hurry up. 'I'll be out in a minute,' he said." Could anything be more ordinary? And then she heard sounds "like fireworks going off" and raced into the yard and saw the body of her dead, 24-year-old husband. Jodie did a service to Edward by coming forward and reclaiming him from the suspicion that comes with those "gang-related" headlines.
RTÉ's Sunday Playhouse slot, which hasn't been the most inspiring of late, is set to reverse that trend with a new, short series featuring work written for Amnesty International's Irish section.
It began with Harold Pinter's Mountain Language - although, strictly speaking, it didn't quite fit the criteria as it dates from 1988. There's a strong whiff of the determinedly "educational" about how the evening's theatre offering is approached, which means the drama isn't let stand alone to speak for itself. Instead, there was an introduction (in this case it was an extract from Pinter's Nobel acceptance speech), and the play was followed by an academic discussion of its themes. I'm not entirely sure all that contextualising is necessary, because Pinter's much acclaimed 20-minute play about torture and the individual's powerlessness under a brutal (unnamed) political regime couldn't have been clearer in both its theme and message. The production, which featured Jeremy Irons, Deirdre Donnelly and Nick Dunning, was suburb.
On BBC Radio 4, the Afternoon Play, Windscale by Paul Dodgson, was broadcast over two afternoons (Monday and Tuesday) and it too carried a message - in this case how the legacy of the nuclear disaster has lived long after the power plant changed its name and how ordinary individuals working in the plant and living nearby were clueless, first about the potential dangers and then about the long-term fallout. It didn't need an academic discussion to hammer home the stark theme.
Rodney's Rice's "listen up - I'm going to explain this to you" approach is a welcome one considering the complex countries and conflicts he visits for his series Worlds Apart (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday). It was back for a new run this week, with Rice visiting Darfur and the teeming refugee camps in eastern Chad. The genocide in Darfur has been going on so long now that it's worth getting a primer on how the tribal conflict started, who the Janjaweed are, and why so much is riding on the talks in Tripoli in two weeks' time.
He explored the rising tensions in the area between the refugees - the local Chadians, for whom the arrival of the Darfurians means they will get even less of the pitifully scarce natural resources, and the "internally displaced persons" from Chad, whose growing numbers are putting an enormous strain on the aid effort. "It happened first in 2003, and we were told; it happened again in 2004, and we were told," said Rice, before going on to list further years, but leaving the "but we did nothing" part of the sentence unspoken.
One Darfurian refugee talked about feeling like an actor in a TV soap opera - to him it seems that the world is happy to sit back and just watch the genocide.
