The brave campaign by RTE Radio 1 to shift its "target demographic" definitively, if marginally, below age 40 has obviously enlisted the battalion from Radio Drama. One of the early markers of Anne Walsh's stewardship of that oft-mocked department is the current series of six Rough Magic adaptations. Itself often mocked in Dublin's theatre world as "the company for the children of the Gate audience", Rough Magic has established an intelligent if sometimes stolid dramatic aesthetic for a generation of play-goers.
This week's Play of the Week, Pom Boyd's Down onto Blue (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday), is one of the Rough Magic works that most obviously provides a reflection of that generation for itself - and takes a quite vicious poke at its Gate-going parents in the process.
Even the cool Miles Davis-y title and snippets of soul on the soundtrack chart the cultural divide between young adults Joey (Boyd herself) and Shane (Darragh Kelly) and their miserable, drink-swilling dad and mum, Frank (Peter Caffrey) and Julie (Deirdre Donnelly).
Joey's back from New York for a job interview in a Cajun restaurant, but does she really want to come home to these sort of family values? Brother Shane is still arse-ing about the house, while Dad had his latest drunk-driving accident on the way home from visiting a prostitute. Joey hears about these circumstances only sotto voce from Shane, as the family is nightmarishly mired in the airport bar where Dad insists a few welcoming drinks are called for.
Mum's not doing a terribly good job at concealing her alienation. Check out the neat twist in the dialogue, as she tells her daughter that she was always her father's pet: "His eyes would light up when you were around," she says to Joey.
"Did they really?"
"You know they did. It made me sick."
Joey is only too happy to continue the love-in, as she recalls in painful detail a particularly nasty thrashing her mother gave her, in front of a young friend.
Mum's not having it. "That is a wonderful piece of fiction, darling."
Eugene O'Neill was writing Happy Families compared to this crowd. Joey has a further comeback: "You mean to say with all the pills you've taken over the years . . . that your memory of certain events is not, to say the least, a little hazy?"
Even given that they are liberally assisted by alcohol, these characters cut to the thrust a little abruptly. But these acid-tipped exchanges are indisputably thrilling and very well suited to the intimacy of radio. And there's more to Boyd's dialogue than vitriol. In a welcome echo of, well, real people, her characters are inclined to break into goofy voices and accents - culchies, Yanks, old fellas.
And awkwardness is perfectly captured, too: "That looks like a very good champagne, too," Frank enthuses to a generous neighbour, then can't resist asking: "Is it a very good one?"
And tension surfaces in unexpected, incidental exchanges. "As long as I don't have to be a hostess . . ." Julie says.
"An hostess," Frank interrupts.
In spite of the frissons of recognition and the adrenal rush of anger, Down onto Blue is about as pleasant as a wallop from a whiskey bottle. Which, in the context of the anodyne (as in Anadin) output with which we're more familiar from the drama folks, is definitely a compliment. The stitch-up from the stage version shows only a few seams, such as a couple of ensemble moments of group business (e.g. Julie sings Eleanor Rigby while Frank rabbits on) when radio usually insists on tighter focus. Boyd's own performance is subdued here, but she can't prevent us noticing that Joey is a thin character compared to the full-blooded mentallers surrounding her. Still, this play worked pretty bloody well.
"Happiness is just another mood that's going to change." The line could be Pom Boyd's, but it's actually from a nice little Belfast-produced drama this column missed while I was (unsuccessfully) seeking refuge in America, but I've since heard a tape.
Jack Houlahan's The Genius of Pleasure (BBC Radio 4, Monday, June 14th) was also notable for the best opening scene of masturbation I've yet heard in a radio play. Tom, recovering from a heart attack, is enjoying an erotic dream about his hospital nurse - but interruptus strikes in the form of the bedside manner of his disgusted wife.
His approach to this chance at auto-stimulation tips us off: Tom's all-encompassing theory, "a pleasure postponed is the purest pleasure", is one he can't quite manage to practise - even if it means he doesn't get his angioplasty because he can't limit himself to a cigarette every three weeks.
The play's punchline - the nurse he dreams of, lusts after and confides in is a lesbian who has quietly seduced his wife - struck me as far too obvious, but maybe I watched too much cable porn in the States.
Another bit of catching up: last week listeners could have heard surely the most non-confrontational interview ever with Aine Ni Chonaill of the Immigration Control Platform. And in the most unexpected place: Refugee Radio, Dublin community station NEAR FM's extraordinary and worthwhile week of special programming about, for and by refugees and asylum-seekers.
And the interviewer, whose gentility astonished even the lady herself, was Remi Agnosoboro, a spokesman for the Association of Nigerian Asylum Seekers in Ireland.
Needless to say, a string of subsequent contributors to the phone-in programme savaged her opinions. But none of them inflicted a fraction of the damage Ni Chonaill did on herself. She insisted that individual Africans are responsible for the absence of liberal democracy in their countries, and warned that Africa is effectively invading Europe.
Meanwhile, Agnosoboro was a model of true liberalism, allowing her to speak freely, and later quietly telling callers that everyone is entitled to an opinion and he would never blame someone for a belief; even if there were an African invasion taking place, Irish listeners could only have welcomed people such as Agnosoboro as our liberators!
More news from the free marketplace of commercial radio, our guarantor of quality and diversity. It comes courtesy of an attentive colleague (thanks, Joe): at 3.30 p.m. on a recent weekday afternoon, Today FM, 98FM and FM104 were all playing, simultaneously, Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer. Whack.