RADIO REVIEW:THERE MUST BE something in the water or the air-conditioning at Montrose. They should check their coolers and air ducts, or see if some kind of frisky jitterbug has infiltrated their radio waves. If you see a man on top of the aerial in Donnybrook criss-crossing his wires, you'll know he's trying to sort out this week's problem.
Before 10am on Monday, the words vulva, cervix, labia, vagina and pubic hair were uttered on RTÉ Radio One. I'm pretty sure this would have got complaints even 10 years ago, but thankfully it didn't seem to register anything on the PC crank-o-meter except a respectful silence from La Tubs on The Tubridy Show (RTÉ Radio One, weekdays).
It was a deceptively blasé Nell McCafferty having a time. She was asked about her nude portrait by artist Daniel Mark Duffy in the RHA. She said, "He talked about women as ageing vessels and I burst out laughing and told him to get stuffed . . . When I look back at photographs of myself in my 20s, I realise that I'm absolutely stunningly beautiful."
One paper put a black strip across her body. "Technically it's called my vulva, which is in fact the area where there is pubic hair." She said there was a witticism that the editor should have put a black strip across her mouth because she talks a lot. She shows one of the many benefits of getting older. Speak, now. Regret, never.
During the women's movement, she attended classes to get know your own body. "The cervix is a yoke up inside your vagina," Nell told a silent Tubs. "You had to open up your labia or whatever. I was the only one in the class who couldn't find my own cervix. Everyone in the class came to look up my vagina." He said, "That was an ice-breaker."
On Tuesday, while interviewing EU Trade Director Gen David O'Sullivan on Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio One, weekdays), Cathal Mac Coille breathed heavily into the mic. It made Gerry Ryan's chomping last week seem positively, well, appetising. It was oddly distracting. No offence or anything, but it wasn't that exciting an interview.
This time, the alarm bells went off in Cranksville. Mac Coille was forced into an apology due to calls. "I am recovering from a cold," he said. "I recorded the interview without any technical supervision very early this morning and I sat far too close to the microphone . . . So sorry about that." Cranks and complainers just aren't as consistent as they used to be.
Not having heard Women's Hour (BBC Radio 4, daily) in a while, I turned the dial in Nell's honour. Jenni Murray's voice is smooth and authoritative. But her soothing tones risk lulling me back into a slumber on a bed of thornless English roses. Obviously, Mac Coille's heavy breathing and Nell's roguish Derry brogue has the opposite effect. Co-presenter Jane Garvey discussed White House kids. Malia Obama, 10, and Sasha Obama, 7, will be the youngest since Amy Carter, who got a terrible time of it. What will it be like for the Obama girls? Contributors Jay Kleinberg, Professor of American Studies at Brunel University, and journalist Fiona Millar, alas, didn't really answer that question.
Theodore Roosevelt reportedly said about his daughter Alice that he could run the country or Alice . . . but not both at the same time. Garvey said of Chelsea Clinton's treatment by the press, which included an impersonation on Saturday Night Live when she was only 13, "The poor woman, it's amazing she's functioning at all." Harry Truman's daughter Margaret, who died aged 83 in January, was a concert singer and, I read later, wrote/ghost wrote murder mysteries set in Washington DC.
Women's Hour didn't examine why the bespectacled Amy Carter got the hardest time at the hands of the media, while sons of presidents could effectively get away with murder.
Presenter of BBC Radio 4's Today, Edward Stourton popped up on Eamon Keane's Lunchtime (Newstalk 106-108, weekdays) to promote his book, It's a PC World. Stourton recently told a Sunday paper that, following a conversation with the UK's late Queen Mother, he concluded that she was a "ghastly old bigot". I say, calling her old is very un-PC.
Reportedly, she told Stourton in the early 1990s, when he had returned from a European summit, "It will never work with all those Huns, wops and dagos." Surely, she was a product of her age, as unpalatable as it was. It's a good line to sell a book, but she's no longer around to dispute it and it's an over-simplification of complicated cutural sensitivities, or lack thereof.
Keane never asked about this, but stayed with Silvio Berlusconi's comment that Barack Obama has a tan, and the well-worn subject of children's books. Ho-hum. Noddy. Tintin. Famous Five. Big Ears. Etc. Stourton said he was forbidden from reading Enid Blyton. Not because of the sensitive content - but because of the bad grammar.
He went to an all-male monastic school and college and, when he started in ITN, "the men got all the interesting jobs and the women made all the coffee". In Washington in the 1980s, Stourton was ticked off for his chauvinistic remarks. He's lucky he didn't work with Nell McCafferty back then. She would have left him crying for his Queen Mother.