Say what you like, say what you don't like, about that old 20th century - it was ours. Or we were its, or something. You knew roughly where you stood with it, anyway. As for 2000 and beyond, I'm not sure I trust any era that commences with all and sundry wishing me a happy millennium, when - be real - I'll count myself extremely lucky to last maybe 5 per cent of that.
RTE's Brendan Balfe seems to know where he stands with the 20th century anyway - and that would appear to be somewhere in the 1960s. The irreplaceable Balfe was responsible for Radio 1's impressive 24-hour sampling of 100 years of audio, Sounding the Century (Friday and Saturday), including excellent music as well as great events. Every time I dropped into it - reasonably often throughout the marathon, and pretty steadily for the final couple of hours - he seemed to be mainly Sounding the Sixties. (Maybe it's just Good Karma for me, man.) If it wasn't the Beatles, it was Martin Luther King. If it wasn't King, it was Jack Kennedy. Or Bobby. Or Teddy.
Then poor Ruth Buchanan, obviously unaware, had the misfortune to begin her excellent 1999 Playback (RTE Radio 1, Saturday), immediately after Balfe's compendium, with a recording of J.F.K. launching the space race - at which point surely hung-over revellers were wondering how the Y2K bug had warped the space-time continuum and placed Radio Kennedy at the top of their dials. (Anyone who slept another half-hour would have awoke still more bewildered to Buchanan's playback of Dana singing All Kinds of Everything in duet with Vincent Browne. And Browne still had the nerve to argue this week, with a bunch of theologians, that there's no such thing as hell.)
More power, then, to B.P. Fallon, who has better reason than most of us to be nostalgic for the old century, but still rung in the new with eyes ahead too. Kudos to the imaginative Today FM execs (bet you never thought you'd read that phrase) who figured he was the man to present the station's Millennium Wipe-out.
New Year's Eve radio should be a bit of a joke - it's either B-team DJs playing the musical soundtrack to a party or, as on BBC Radio 5 Live, it's the sound of fireworks going off, hour by interminable hour, all over the world. My heart went out particularly to the 5 Live reporter who got the Dublin gig - no doubt thrilled to have drawn the party capital of Europe, and then found a few confused tourists milling around the streets.
Derek MooneyE brownie points to beat the band, because he came in to Montrose to present a token half-hour of live "countdown" around midnight, in the midst of those Balfe sessions. It was just enough time to take a couple of phone calls, interview a fierce-poetical Philip Boucher-Hayes at Christ Church, listen grouchily to the bells, give out the Samaritans' telephone number (that was good, anyway) and play Riverdance.
Old B.P., on the other hand, approached midnight with Edith Piaf singing Je ne Regrette Rien, then did (yes) play us a Sixtiesised Jimi Hendrix Auld Lang Syne ("to go forward sometimes you have to go backwards, you know"), wished us a "happy whatever you want and happy whatever you've got" (now that's poetical), and finally moved via Saints Elvis and John Lennon to the most doo-doo-hot dance beat this side of the pirates, or that side for that matter. (If Chemical Brothers' Leave Home isn't the perfect evocation of where the calendar says we simply must stand with our old century, I don't know what is.) Oldish or newish, soul, rock, rhythm or blues, if B.P. played a record, it was because it was wonderful.
Slightly earlier in the evening, B.P. evoked nostalgia for the great era of priests on late-night radio. In the good old days, Father Michael Cleary's son supposedly used to drop him outside the studio; on the cusp of Y2K, Mother Bernadette O'Connor brought her young fella inside with her.
Blessed and Very Nearly Silent Sinead ("Hiya, Rev" says B.P. by way of introduction) was there for the love of da riddim. For connoisseurs of Sineadisms, she did praise Bob Marley as "a vampire slayer".
New Year's weekend also saw BBC Radio 3 present some programmes that painted an all-too-accurate picture of that other century in its horror and glory. You want to know about culture and politics, listen to Elgar elegising a king and democratising the orchestra in his second symphony, as explained by Anthony Payne in a new series on how composers do what they do, Discovering Music (BBC Radio 3, Sunday).
Same day, same station, more culture and politics: did Richard Strauss elegise Hitler and co-operate in "decontaminating" an orchestra of its Jewish musicians? Strauss - A Musical Ostrich? made a pretty convincing case for the composer's swastika tattoo, despite the equivocal title and question mark. (Thomas Mann's son Klaus, who met Strauss after the war, quotes him as saying "Hitler was very bad - so musically one-sided. Always he wanted to hear Wagner, Wagner, Wagner. Hardly ever did he go to my operas.")
Oh yeah, I did actually listen to the radio this week. There were some surprises all right - who would have believed, for example, that Donal O'Kelly's gloriously physical one-man shows, Catalpa and Bat the Father, Rabbit the Son (RTE Radio 1, Monday and Tuesday), would work so well on radio? (Kudos to the imaginative RTE execs. . .) And there were some familiar feelings aroused, like that itch on my station-changing finger when David Hanly launches into a pontifical "question". But, really, this week was nothing like last week. You knew where you stood, roughly, with last week.
Anyway, here's wishing all our readers a happy, happy next week.