Radio Review: 'I love these bored housewives ringing up having an opinion," said Louis Walsh on Liveline (RTÉ1, Monday), and with that one patronising line he prompted listeners sitting on the fence over why Ireland bombed at the Eurovision to leap off it immediately.
But it would take more than a boy band manager in a hissy fit to unnerve the caller, who calmly replied that she was phoning from work.
"Good for you," said Walsh, in that "ya boo to you" tone favoured by school bullies. Chris Doran wasn't the problem, she said, it was Walsh and the other You're a Star judges who were supposed to be experts but who just didn't know their jobs. Her opinion was echoed by several other callers, while Walsh sniggered "Oh God," or "I love it," as if all these pesky nobodies with opinions were too dim to take seriously.
The callers described Chris Doran as a wedding singer and said our ballad approach was 10 years out of date. Walsh wasn't taking any blame, although Chris Doran had been his wild card entry into the You're a Star contest and former Westlife member Bryan McFadden wrote the song. His line was that the TV programme was just an amateur talent show and that the judges had only a couple of songs to choose from - so really, what did we expect? Then Brush Shields waded in: "With all due respect to you, Louis, your lads should be banned from writing."
As Clare McKeon said: "If you're going to dish it out, honey, you have to be able to take it." She was talking about her experience on RTÉ Charity 252, the week-long radio station set up as a fund-raiser for People in Need. Together with six other women, she volunteered to be locked up in a house and present all the programmes on the station.
The best description of the whole thing goes to the always hilarious Daniel O'Donnell character on The Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show (Today FM, Monday), who said it was like a "demented Dancing at Lughnasa". For such a motley, pulled-together thing, the charity radio station worked. The seven women were given a hellish task - to present back-to-back radio programmes all day without any scripts or direction.
The radio stars that emerged were the ones with the biggest personalities and some broadcasting experience, particularly Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh and Clare McKeofor their vastly entertaining agony aunt programme - a sort of hysterical Frankie Byrne show without the Sinatra.
When Eileen Reid joined in, all they were short of was a cauldron.
The raging debate over children's viewing habits is usually so caught up with advertising that there's no room to discuss actual programme content, which is a pity because children's programmes tend to be highly innovative and downright funny. In Masterpiece: I Love TV (BBC World Service, Tuesday), presenter Ed Butler looked at children's television and, given the name of the programme, he didn't spend too much time sermonising on TV producing fat children.
Chris Schief, a German media analyst for UNICEF, talked of the "Spongebobification" of children's TV and anyone unfamiliar with Bob, the sponge who lives in a pineapple under the sea wearing his trademark red shorts, may have switched off there and then. But what he was talking about is the massive and increasing number of teenagers and adults who watch cartoons. New research has thrown up the extraordinary fact that more American adults watch Cartoon Network than the news channel CNN.
At the other end of the age spectrum, there was the even more alarming finding that one in four American babies between the ages of six months and two years has a television in their bedroom. As the mom from Atlanta, Georgia said in a perky voice, "it's a mechanical nanny".
This being the World Service, children from Kenya to Pakistan were interviewed and all had their favourite programmes, much to the satisfaction of Anne Wood, creator of the Teletubbies, who said she was sick of defending children's TV. "Listen to them laughing while they're watching," she said, and the giggles of the Balinese children crammed on the sofa in front of Tom and Jerry were great. "What TV should do," she said, "is get children to engage imaginatively with a programme, to develop an imaginative literacy." She advocates that television "positively discriminates in favour of cultural sharing".
It's certainly a refreshing take on a subject that tends to be dominated by negatives and the debate on advertising to children on Today with Pat Kenny (RTÉ1, Wednesday), was jaded and predictable. A spokesman from a new Irish pressure group looking for a ban was pitched against an advertising industry representative. It was a circular argument that could have done with the voice of reason of the UNICEF man. "TV is okay as long as it's monitored by the parents," he said. And there's always the off button.
