The BBC World Service International Playwrighting Competition comes with all the hype and excitement of, well, the BBC World Service. Nonetheless, the idea of jurors sifting through more than 1,000 radio plays from 96 countries is strangely stirring: what other cultural competition can claim to be so genuinely global?
What other organising body, short (maybe) of a UN agency, can begin to claim such real universality, such a long and essentially democratic reach, such widespread respect, such intimations of impartiality, even such a lack of obvious corporate self-interest? Well, yes indeed, MTV, but after that the World Service must be tops.
With a sample of entries that size, amassed through the likes of the World Service without any intermediate state bodies, you can begin to take seriously the sweeping generalisations made by the judges: entries from Africa and the Indian subcontinent tend to be political; those from Europe are likelier to focus on personal and family concerns.
Which is not to say we should take the judges' judgments too seriously. The absurd and ignorant bypassing of Mary Duffy's documentary, The Lino Crossing, by the Prix Italia jury this autumn is proof positive that mere selection to a prestigious panel is no sure sign of great intelligence, or even mere common sense.
One of the judges who introduced this week's broadcast of the BBC World Service winner, Australian Maree Gutterson's Stuffed (BBC World Service, Saturday and Sunday), immediately aroused suspicion: Stick with what you know, she was warning familiarly. "On the other hand, there was one play . . . from Sierra Leone . . . and he obviously was writing about what he knew. And it was so brutal, and so distressing, that one also realised that that was something that could never go out on the air." Which seems an extraordinary way of putting it.
No less a personage than Nobel winner Wole Soyinka was one of the other judges responsible for the selection of the surreal, slightly sick Stuffed, which Gutterson entered into the competition not because she's one of the masses huddled around the World Service on the wireless, but because she saw news of it on the (you guessed it) Internet.
Stuffed is suitably national, starting with Waltzing Matilda being plucked on the banjo, and a lead character called Mother McCray, a working-class Aussie mammy with a full lexicon of Ozisms: "I've got more gaaass than Esso tonight" is her comment when the coq au vin goes wrong.
Meanwhile, Stan is at the dance matter-of-factly puking - "a sudden chunga" - into the punchbowl on his girlfriend Yvette. "I already swalla'd the inevitable back twice, ya know." Complete with a running joke about taxidermy, the success of Stuffed indicates that the judges like that earthy anti-podean . . . stuff. I wouldn't mind another sift through the thousand entries.
The RTE Radio 1 documentary was in World Service territory, literally. Niall M. Doyle's Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow - A Kenyan Mission (Wednesday) told the story of his great-aunt Therese, a Carmelite nun, and the three companions who together established a convent in Nairobi.
I still don't get why a contemplative order would want to go so far to set up an institution, but that may be because it was tough enough to follow the testimony of the surviving old sisters amidst the highly ambient but consonant-swallowing echoes of the convent. Susan Fitzgerald's readings from Sister Therese's (insufferably) rosy missives were clearer, and are themselves a valuable dose of social history.
Tipp FM's efforts on behalf of illiterate adults right here at home are nearer my notion of a worthy mission. Emer Woodfull and Soundbyte (RTE Radio 1, Saturday) did what I've been promising to do again for ages: it gave some coverage to the way the Clonmel-based local commercial station, with support from the Independent Radio and Television Commission, devoted a special frequency to broadcast literacy tutoring developed by the National Adult Literacy Agency. About 150 listeners registered and used the programmes in conjunction with literacy materials at home - and further tutelage readily available.
John O'Connell of Tipp FM, who spoke to Woodfull, deserves credit for the initiative, a real breakthrough for the medium as an educational tool, and one with huge potential in the digital future. One hopes it will be repeated on a larger scale.
I do, I really do try to get through the week without mentioning Eamon Dunphy, in spite of his desirable demographics. Truly, in recent days he didn't tempt me greatly, even when his Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) tried to rebalance what he rightly regarded as a harmless Monday discussion of asylum-seekers (a welcome harmlessness, I would have thought).
The balance was achieved by having Kevin "I Haven't an Atom of Racism in My Body" Myers in to deride the use even of the term "asylum-seekers" - a term which is absolutely correct, albeit within the messy confines of Irish policy; to discourse at length on the non-work-ethic of "Afro-Caribbeans" - a group notable by their absence in Ireland and so completely irrelevant to the "debate", such as it is; to suggest that we face "sexual" problems in communities where dark-skinned people move in; to make outdated generalisations about how middle-class liberals are isolated from the "problem", ignoring how the property market is altering the social geography of Dublin; and to altogether do everything in his power to annoy the likes of me.
And even then, I wasn't going to mention Eamon. Then the Ian Dempsey Break- fast Show (Today FM, Monday to Friday) played My Way from Dustin's new album, and there was Dunphy trying to out-Frank the man himself, and indeed to out-Vicious Sid, the only other coverer of My Way who matters. As George Byrne said somewhere this week, a propos of the Corrs' sacrilegious version of Phil Lynott's Old Town, "you don't mess with that kind of iconography." So give it up, Dunphy - you can't hit those high notes. (Mind you, it's funnier than the Navan Man album.)