Radio Review Bernice HarrisonThere were many layers in Ciaran Cassidy's excellent Documentary on One: The Ballad of Patrick Foley (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday), each one as thought-provoking as the next.
At the beginning it was a detective story set in 2005 with a woman telling of finding what she thought were human bones in a forest in Britain. Various policemen then told a little of the process of identification - of botanists and forensic pathologists and the painstaking business of going door-to-door to try to find out to whom the bones belonged.
It was eventually established that the body was most likely "Old Paddy" - a quiet and dignified elderly man of the road, who had lived rough in the forest for years and earned his meagre living as a jobbing gardener in what sounded like a genteel rural area of Kent. Further investigation established he was 74-year-old Irishman Paddy Folen and he had gone missing 10 years before - although sadly nobody noticed at the time - and that he had most likely died of hypothermia.
The locals spoke warmly of Folen, retelling the many and conflicting stories he had told them about his background, and all with a hint of guilt that maybe they should have done more for him. In an effort to track Folen's family down, Cassidy wrote to a telephone book-worth of Folens.
As the replies trickled in - the tentative messages left on his answering machine were broadcast - they revealed another very poignant layer of recent Irish history. Of men who had emigrated in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and who had never been heard of again. They told of many Paddy Folens who left mostly for the building sites in London or wherever and who simply lost touch with their families back home.
Cassidy eventually found a possible family for Old Paddy in Galway but even that was uncertain. He pieced together the curious story - interweaving the programme with a powerful ballad about the discovery of Folen's body - in what was a moving and almost elegiac piece of work.
Aedín Gormley's Artszone (Lyric FM, Saturday) tends to get forgotten when there are discussions about dismal arts coverage on RTÉ, a pity because it does a good job mixing a wide range of topics with presenters who know their stuff.
The combination of a low-listenership station and a Saturday teatime slot has to be to blame for the programme falling off the radar. This week, Luke Clancy spoke to Rachel Thomas, senior curator at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, about the gallery's upcoming programme and he broadened the discussion out from a list of upcoming attractions to an interesting conversation on the relationship between the artist and the curator. It was just the sort of specialist dialogue that arts programme fans look for, the sort that wouldn't fit easily into the other teatime "arts and culture" programme, Drivetime with Dave (RTÉ Radio 1).
It was never going to be easy for Newstalk to come up with an audience-grabbing alternative to the super-efficient, straightforward RTÉ daily News at One, or even something that would lure audiences away from local radio at that time. When the station went nationwide late last year, the sober-sounding, experienced current affairs journalist Brendan O'Brien was replaced with Eamon Keane, who now presents Lunchtime, a sort of dull tabloid show.
On Wednesday the programme seemed to decide that the (still unidentified) remains found last week in Wexford were those of local missing woman Fiona Sinnott, prompting an extensive item on missing Irish women. Keane flagged an entirely pointless interview with Sinnott's sister as a "Newstalk exclusive".
A serious frustration is that Keane drives interviews in a way that seems more about him getting what he wants to hear than letting people speak. It's a technique that gets very old very quickly, but not as quickly as Keane's colloquialisms, which don't add colour as they are probably intended to, but instead make the whole thing sound oddly amateurish. "Come here to me" is a favourite question prefix, the AA Roadwatch woman was introduced as the "bould Orla" (it may not have been Orla - the "bould" bit threw me so much I couldn't quite catch her name), and I lost count of the "listen till I tell yas" - a daft lead-in at the best of times on a listening medium.
There have to be other ways of showing you're no longer a Dublin-only station than sounding like something off Killinascully FM.