The talk of the talk-radio world across the ocean is last week's on-air revelation from the original shock jock, Howard Stern, that he had left his wife. Anyone familiar with Stern's fashioning of his persona - as in his funny and self-serving autobiographical film, Private Parts - knows that this is a problem: his adolescent libido spills over on a daily basis, as hookers and strippers stream through his studio, but it has always been clearly in the context of a happy home life. Needless to say, the marketeers are already fervently polling to ascertain the audience impact.
Talk radio here is not averse to a little adolescent libido. Adrian Kennedy (FM104) spent a profitable hour on Tuesday in animated discussion of what has become an old chestnut: what kids get up to at teen discos. Whether you think Kennedy's repeated questioning of young callers about what they've done and seen amounts to solid reportage or kiddie porn may depend on how you feel about an alleged 13-year-old girl saying "blow job" on the radio. As always, the context for the panicked discussion was complete ignorance. "The [teen] pregnancy rate is on the rise!" one alarmed caller cried out, without fear of contradiction from anything so inconvenient as a fact.
The state of late-night talk radio in Dublin raises broader questions. The format's pioneer, Chris Barry, plies his trade now on 98FM - which is itself part of a growing Irish media empire. The new emperor is Denis O'Brien, whose radio interests now also include two of the forthcoming local stations, News Talk FM and Spin FM. (In neither of these does he hold a majority of shares). His telecommunications company, Esat, does more than make phone calls; it has a significant say in the development of the Internet here, and he only narrowly missed out on acquiring Cablelink.
Such diversity and "synergy" may be good for business, but what about radio? One of the very few left-liberal talk-radio hosts in the US, Jim Hightower, lost his job after he was critical on-air of ABC-TV's approach to a tobacco documentary; ABC - part of a corporate megalith that also includes Disney - happened also to be, effectively, his boss. So will O'Brien's media interests be critically discussed on the important, "independent" News Talk service? The Chris Barry Phone-In Show (98FM), definitely less ugly and raunchy than Adrian Kennedy's but certainly no less ignorant, would certainly steer conveniently clear of a subject as boring as who controls the media. Wednesday's hot-and-heavy row on Barry's show concerned Westlife's part in this year's poppy appeal, and Sinn Fein's negative comments about same. Barry, as he often does, spun himself into a hero of the brave resistance, based on the (alleged) off-air comments of listeners who said they were afraid to go on-air with anti-SF sentiments. "Don't be intimidated!" he cried in his best Moore Street rising tones. "I will fight tooth and nail . . . The little armchair terrorists are on the phone already! Yez won't imitate (sic) me!"
Republicans were committing the cardinal talk-radio sin of referring to history. ("Living in the history books" is the technical term). It was, to say the least, ironic to hear Barry defend the poppy by crying: "Stop living in the past!" It was, however, in keeping with the tenor of a show in which a listener responded to Barry's suggestion that SF smacked of fascism with: "Fascism? It's worse than fascism. It's Nazism all over again."
IT's definitely fair to say that this was not the view of history from The Internationalists (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday), though among the most disturbing things about Sinead McCarthy's fine documentary was the sense that these vivid Irish memories of the Nicaraguan revolution belong to a terribly remote past.
McCarthy's subjects were not the shortterm, coffee-picking sandalistas of the 1980s, tolerated for their solidarity but of little practical benefit. These four Irish people spent years in Central America, some of them prepared to fight for the Sandinista revolution if that oft-threatened US invasion came.
Their continued emotional involvement was clear . Alongside the stories of revolutionary demoralisation - brought about largely by US threats and the reality of US economic war and vicious proxy "low-intensity conflict" - were really lovely tales of revolutionary idealism. One of them, Benny McCabe, remembered a meeting with government minister Fernando Cardenale, himself a Jesuit priest. We heard a remarkable verbatim recollection of Cardenale's comparison of education under the old Somoza regime and the new Nicaraguan system; it sounded particularly apposite this week.
"Let me try and compare it . . . . Under the dictator, the old education set about teaching young people the most important things in lives were to get the exams, so that they would get the positions, so that they would get the money, so that they could buy the things that the system told them they needed in order to be happy and successful. "The gasoline that kept that motor going was egoismo, understanding life in terms of `what I can get out of it'."
So far, so familiar. So what was Nicaragua going to do about it? "The new education would try and create the new man and the new woman, who would understand life in terms of co-operating, in terms of sharing, more than anything else in terms of transforming, of trying to make the world a better place for having been in it.
"The gasoline which will keep that motor going is love."
Which is all very well and good, but how do you put all that in a league table?