RadioReview: An interview with media mogul Rupert Murdoch is such a rare thing that The Weekend Business Show (BBC Radio Five Live, Sunday) presenter Jeff Randall sounded more than chuffed in the pre-programme publicity. He was, he told one of last Sunday's newspapers, getting a full 23 minutes of Murdoch, live - Tony Blair only gets 10 minutes.
In the end the show didn't quite live up to the giddy pre-sell. For the first half, Randall - who like all Five Live presenters is usually relaxed and on top of his game - sounded scripted and slightly awestruck as Murdoch, for whom uncertainty is just a word in the dictionary, gave his pronouncements on business and political life.
Predicting a tough year for business, he said Britain is "slipping behind because of the increase in productivity in America and Australia". On the Blair-Brown project, he thinks "it's been a pretty good government", although he's not keen at all about the "over-taxed", "nanny state" elements and he talked nostalgically about the every-man-for-himself Thatcher years.
Randall got a bit braver as the programme went on, questioning whether Murdoch's empire is going to be "run over in the digital age". Murdoch swatted away that one pretty easily and Sky, he said, has been good for football. "The game is better, it's awash with cash" - as if one thing naturally leads to another. He knows he's still demonised. "If you're a catalyst for change, you're going to make enemies." Murdoch damned the new Tory leader, David Cameron, saying "he has been all about image".
That's not something anybody has ever said about Enda Kenny. Ray D'Arcy (The Ray D'Arcy Show,Today FM, Tuesday) got the charisma thing out of the way early in his interview with the Fine Gael leader. Before Christmas the presenter described him as having about as much charisma as a potato - a cold cooked potato at that - and so, with Kenny facing him in studio, he apologised before giving him every chance to lay out his stall. "This isn't a political programme," D'Arcy said early on, in what sounded like a great big hint to chill out and to stop the "it's about values and an agenda where we see the future" political speak. A listener called in to say she was sure she'd heard the interview before - and I felt the same having heard Kenny a few days earlier on the heavyweight This Week (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday).
Despite D'Arcy's easy tone and line of questioning, Kenny just couldn't switch gears to the more relaxed format. Even when he announced some policies - a national health screening programme, medical cards for the under-fives and a promise to "clear out the drunks and hangers-on from A&E" - the crowd-pleasing plans got lost in his light-voiced monotone. "I wouldn't say I have buckets of charisma to throw away," said Kenny, somewhat unnecessarily.
Where did all this emphasis on charisma come from? In the same way Kenny gets a hard time for being less than magnetic, one of his predecessors, John Bruton, had to suffer Homer Simpson lookalike references and jokes about his spectacular donkey laugh in his time - and it hasn't held him back one little bit.
As EU Ambassador to Washington, he is the subject of a two-part interview which began this week, Mr Ambassador (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday). And what an all-round jammy job it appears to be.
The old saying that diplomats dine for their country is, he says, true. His day often starts with a working breakfast, then there's a lunch meeting followed by an official dinner. His job is mostly managerial and his worst moment was when France rejected the EU constitution.
Speaking on message, he said there is a need for people to identify with the European project. "We wouldn't have as many problems with the constitution if the president (of Europe) was elected by the people." As well as heaps of big dinners, there must be a lot of ivory-tower thinking in diplomatic circles. Surely Bruton must remember from his own foot-slogging electioneering days on the doorsteps of Meath just how difficult it is to get people to be bothered to vote even in local elections, never mind something as remote as the "European project".
The laugh, incidentally, wasn't in evidence. It has given way to an avuncular chuckle, which we heard as he described his impressions of the US - a country he said, where people were more up-front about their religious persuasion and practice and where there's a lot of emphasis on consumerism.
He misses constituency work, but he doesn't miss the Dáil, although "being prime minister, where one is cajoling and persuading" did prepare him well for his current job. "Parliaments," said Bruton, "aren't as central to affairs as they were in my time" - a bit of a poke in the eye to his former colleagues, those holiday-loving Dáil members.
