Radio Review/Bernice Harrison:Diarmaid Ferriter's new series Judging Dev (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday) is a massive thing - 10 parts, its own smart looking website, podcasts (dance at the crossroads to that, why don't you) and top historians rounded up for their take on Éamon de Valera.
It's got the whiff of a series destined for the archives, where it will be mined in future broadcasts for clips. So far, so important, but listening to the first programme, it seems to me that one element in the equation has been ignored - the listener.
Ferriter has just published a new book on de Valera, so he knows his subject inside out, but what he and his producer Peter Mooney seem to forget is that not everyone out here in listenerland is as clued in. I'd challenge them to stand outside the GPO on any given day and ask the first 10 people that pass what they know about Éamon de Valera.
The results, I'd bet, would undermine their clear assumption that everyone is starting from the same high knowledge base. The series began on Sunday without even the basic outline of who de Valera was - even a five-minute sketch would have done. Instead, the three historians, Michael Laffan, Charles Townshend and Ferriter, launched into a detailed discussion of Dev's involvment in 1916 and his subsequent emergence as leader of Sinn Féin.
The Volunteers, the IRB, the Home Rule party - just some of the names thrown around without a subclause of basic explanatory information. There was an assumption that "we" all know the background to what these eminent history chaps are talking about and are as keen as them to explore the very finer details.
But it's horribly alienating to the general listener and what it means is that something that was always going to be a niche series is making that niche even smaller.
History buffs would seek out the information anyway - Ferriter's new book on which the series is based will be in their Christmas stockings - but the challenge is to make the half-interested listener who doesn't think they could be engaged by a history programme sit up and listen.
Also from a production point of view, there's a lack of imagination in the shape of the programme. Three talking heads in studio interspersed with the always superb Joe Taylor putting on his de Valera voice isn't exactly a sparkling new format.
EVEN THOSE RTÉ Radio 1 listeners who aren't involved with the school system knew only too well that it was mid-term break this week because of the number of stand-ins on air. All it proves is the power some of the big-name broadcasters have over their bosses, and in truth some can feel secure in their holiday requests.
Liveline and The Ryan Tubridy Show were complete switch-offs, with Damien O'Reilly and Anton Savage in the respective chairs. O'Reilly turns the programme into a sort of parody, feeding a perception that it's just people phoning in for a good old whine. Don't believe me? Listen back to Wednesday's Liveline where a dentally troubled caller talked at tedious length, egged on by O'Reilly, about his "leaking crowns", or indeed any of Savage's programmes, which fade into the wallpaper due to his bland, oddly personality-less style of interview. Although now Myles Dungan is back on the scene, there may just be a chip in Pat Kenny's Teflon.
Dungan stood in for Kenny, bringing an engaging amount of energy and enthusiasm, backed up by his easygoing interview technique and obvious understanding and interest in all of the topics he's covering, whether it's the quite bonkers Heather Mills or the latest news from Iraq.
MALCOLM MCLAREN IS an unlikely presenter of a programme about a particularly elegant time in fashion history but The New Look (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday) really worked. It was a look back at Christian Dior's collection for 1947, which has influenced fashion ever since. His models needed 16-inch waists to carry off the glamorous "new look", which was defined by enormous full skirts displaying, in the austere postwar period when fabric was scarce, a sense of excess.
Designing for hourglass figures was so different to now, observed McLaren, when designers look to the shape of pubescent girls (or should that be boys?) for inspiration. Not everyone was so impressed. Coco Chanel acerbically remarked: "Christian Dior doesn't dress for women, he upholsters them."