Radio Review: Radio in August, with its audience scattered, is full of the the dull thuds and lifeless music of space fillers. You'd be hard put to find anything worth listening to and, when you do, hard put not to doze off to languid presenters.
That's the norm and then there's Damien Kiberd (Newstalk 106, Monday to Friday). Energy undiluted by these dog days of summer, he spent a lively week extracting information and entertainment from guests, callers and whatever news there was on the day.
On Monday, following yet another of the summer's gruesome murders, he got crime reporter Paul Williams eloquently wound up about the violent reality of Dublin's ganglands. Young lads, said Williams, are randomly killing one another on the capital's streets. That alcohol and drugs are involved in almost all killings, urban and rural, is depressing but hardly news - though there's a good yarn somewhere in Williams's observations about the "surreal world" of the courts where the brutal and violent daily hire themselves "very, very good counsel" with obvious results.
Radio listening texters are the other live wires of summer radio, communicating seething hearts and blasphemous souls from the tip of idle fingers. As ubiquitous as the ads, they're given far more air time. They could be a good thing, but there's a worrying air of self-importance about a lot of them and some days you feel they've taken over the airwaves. There are other days, of course, when you wish they would.
More than 140,000 children, women and men died after the events of one bright day in August, 1945. The figure was debated on Six Places that Changed the World (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday), but the salient view never varied as learned American, English and Japanese contributors agreed the dead of Hiroshima died so that the rest of us might live. The atom bomb, Prof Peter Zimmerman of the US said, was a vaccination against nuclear war.
The argument, old as the bomb itself, went predictably on with everyone insisting the vaccination wasn't a moral justification but had, for 60 years, made the world a safer place. Prof Zimmerman worried, however, about people forgetting and thought "our leaders" might need to think about a "booster shot". As thoughts for the week go it was less than soothing.
Albert Reynolds was soothing to the point of soporific when he meandered a while with Brenda Power (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday). Rehashing the glory days of chasing peace in the North, he said things had to be sorted because they were affecting the economy in this part of Ireland. He told us nothing about himself we didn't already know and he told it in relentless monotone.
Olivia O'Leary (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday) got nicely dug in with Lynn Barber of the Observer and Nigel Farndale of the Sunday Telegraph, both of whom are a lot more celebrated for their style of interview than many of the celebs they talk to. Barber admitted to being irredeemably nosy, Farndale more loftily said he likes to have a conversation "of sorts" with people. Both made for good, gossipy radio. Barber's gems were about an "impossibly rude" Marianne Faithfull and how Richard Harris "played with himself all the time in the way you see little boys doing but not usually 60-year-olds". She liked him.
She was put off by Jeremy Irons when he arrived late, and paid him back in print, but was later seduced when he sent the "sweetest" letter saying his wife Sinéad Cusack had enjoyed every word and agreed.
Farndale said Henry Kissinger had a definite eye to posterity and that Gore Vidal's flies were open throughout the interview. Neither of them likes interviewing actors, who "gush away and say nothing", according to Barber. A bit like summer radio.
Damien Kiberd was at it again later in the week, pugnacious with energy as he discussed the "interesting social trend" that has young, single women leaping at starter mortgages. More women than men are taking out single mortgages in Galway and Cork, with all of them, according to the man from IFG Mortgages, "security-focused and wanting to be independent". Fellas are not so good at saving, it seems. Nothing much new there.
If all of this has given you a headache, you might like to think twice about taking the likes of Solpadeine and Nurofen Plus. The word from Dr Simon Mills (and the Irish Medical Board, which is pushing for said tablets to come with a warning on the packet) is that they contain codeine which, like morphine and heroin, is an opiate narcotic. It's all a question of degree, of course, but Mills and Kiberd were effectively off-putting as they chatted about the risks of depression and addiction and the unknown long-term consequences of taking too many painkillers.
A texter wanted to know if the couple of Solpadeine he popped every morning as he got out of bed were doing him any harm. Of course they were and he was told so, but gently. This is summertime radio after all.