The passage of 75 years of 2RNRadio EireannRTE is a landmark well worth landmarking. Most Irish listeners, people who over the years have shown a remarkable capacity for historical looking - and listening - back, would probably agree, and are doubtless enjoying some of the special programming that is accompanying the anniversary this weather.
Some programmes have even brought RTE programmes out-of-doors. And this column's continuing devotion to "public" radio brought me down to Dublin's Peacock Theatre last Monday evening to lend eye and ear to Townhall Tonight (RTE Radio 1, 2FM and Lyric FM, Monday) - meanwhile, leaving the tape running on a joyous, fascinating Ceili House Remembers (RTE Radio 1, Monday), coming live just a little earlier from a jam-packed ????????? Ceol in Smithfield, across the north city.
Ceili House, it is clear, knows a thing or two about taking its show on the road.
To be honest, I wish I'd tried to squeeze into Ceol, because in spite of some wonderful musical sections, Townhall Tonight prompted Cringe Factor 14-plus with the ill-conceived irony of its approach to putting on a variety show. The abiding visual memory of the evening is the embarrassed grin on the faces of the young brothers from band Relish, as an audience of RTE insiders old enough to be their parents and grandparents belted out something called Wibbly Wobbly Walk.
Falling as I do into the "parents" section of that audience, I'm not old enough to recall the original Townhall Tonight; I don't know if it was one big music-hall cliche, presented in a way indistinguishable from its English counterparts. If it was, I'm happily open to correction from listeners who reckon this reprise struck the right balance of both capturing and parodying its flavour. Me, I've still got a bad taste in my mouth from it.
It pains me to admit that two of my favourite RTE "personalities" were behind most of what was wrong. Aengus MacAnally's sins were chiefly visual - and as such, forgivable for the producer of a radio programme: he superfluously stood centre stage for far too much of the evening, checking the stopwatch around his neck and signalling to people off-stage whom he might well have been standing beside.
Before the show, MacAnally also encouraged us to ooh and ahh at the hilariously big words ("mellifluous", ho-ho) in presenter Gerry Ryan's script, thus rendering occasionally inaudible a conceit that was silly to begin with. I'm sure Gerry (my other fave) wishes his efforts at singing had also been inaudible - actually, I'm not sure, because he brought all his usual self-loving charm to the slaughtering of Baby It's Cold Outside. Afterwards, his schmoozy kiss with Honor Heffernan (whose game efforts at rescuing the duet were to no avail), as if they were performing equals, constituted the evening's low point.
High points? While the comedy generally fell flat, the musicians were mercifully immune to the prevailing irony: trad. flautist Niall Keegan was brilliant; Juliet Turner joined Brian Kennedy for a compelling duet; Mary Coughlan sang powerful tribute to Billie Holiday; and the soulful notes of Downpatrick's Relish were simply astonishing, Marvin Gaye reincarnate. And while Relish's songs might not be equal to that comparison, Little Flame could be read, if you were so inclined, as a metaphor for the burning emotional impact of radio. Just as well something here could.
Regular readers know this column is averse neither to "live" radio nor to tongue-in-cheek genre revisionism. Indeed, seeing Roger Gregg and Crazy Dog Audio Theatre performing Invasion from Planet Vampire in October was my radio highlight of 2000.
The same company's Tread Softly, Bill Lizard (RTE Radio 1, Saturday) is studio-bound - no, wrong word for what Gregg can do with his studio - how about studio-liberated? It's also more slow-burning comedy, but it's very much worth checking out if you're reading this before 11 a.m. Saturday. Fair play to RTE for giving it a shot.
Two things Dublin listeners can no longer check out, leaving the airwaves altogether drier: beloved pirate stations Phantom FM (for indie rock) and Jazz FM (for "black music"). Both went off the air this week in time to apply for the "special interest" licence on offer from the Independent Radio and Television Commission. Cue weeping and gnashing of teeth. It's rotten that only one of them can win its legality; rottener still that neither of them might, as money-men arrive with proposals for "classic rock" and "country and Irish" stations. Is it too much to ask for one non-classical music station that's actually dedicated to music?
Just when you're getting really depressed by the season and this dilution of the radio draught, BP Fallon's Wang Dang Doodle Into 2001 turns up on New Year's Eve (Today FM) to remind us what dedication to music sounds like on the national airwaves.
This year I heard only bits and pieces of the show - notably "the Rev", aka Sinead O'Connor, sending out some hard-hitting hip-hop and righteous reggae to her teenage son, plus BP's predictable midnight recourse to the mighty combination of Kubrick, Hendrix and Lennon - but let's hope this is now established as, at the very least, an annual tradition.
A bit of snow and ice in the dead season would be welcome annually too. Last Sunday's melt-out of most sporting events brought an excellent repeated documentary on to the wireless. Field of Dreams (BBC Radio 5 Live) told the story of one of the last football matches at Wembley - not England v Germany, but a game between two pick-up sides organised through a trivia competition on the station.
The gloriously pompous Stuart Hall is one of the great voices of British radio, but in his commentary on the match he asserted insupportably that at least England couldn't lose this one. England could: one of the pick-up teams styled itself "Swindon Irish Nomads", a gang of ageing golfing companions gathered from the building trade. With the help of veteran Northern Ireland international Jimmy Quinn, the lads learned the rudiments of organising themselves on the big Wembley pitch - absolutely essential against the fit team of twenty-something English college pals pitted against them. (Wasn't it funny that no working-class Englishmen made it to this quintessentially English football final? Nearly like Chelsea in the FA Cup.) The result? Victory for the old Irish over the young toffs, and easy at that.
"Is the H in throat after the first T or the second T?" Listeners to Under the Goldie Fish when it was a mainstay on RTE's erstwhile Cork local radio will be familiar with the Cork city vernacular of which its writer, Conal Creedon, is a master. His play, This Old Man, He Played One (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday) was less in-your-face absurd than the wondrous Goldie Fish, but like that serial it nonetheless packed plenty of wit, unconventional family situations and not a few plot twists into less than an hour.
Extremely well acted, it goes out again tonight and tomorrow afternoon on BBC World Service, since it's RTE's contribution to an international festival of radio drama from new playwrights, called WorldPlay. And that's as good a way as any to celebrate 75 years of Irish radio.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie