Radio Review Bernice HarrisonBack from the Christmas break and there's a same-old same-old feeling about the radio schedules. On TV the schedulers embrace the Januaryishness of it all - a trolley-load of fight-the-flab programmes, new series on every station and ever more daft programmes scraping the bottom of the celebrity barrel.
But at least it shows that someone's trying. On radio it's business as usual - the only shake-up was the announcement of the move of the great Larry Gogan from weekdays on 2FM to an as yet undecided weekend slot on the same station. It mightn't turn out to be quite the sideline shift it first appears - RTÉ Radio 1 at least, has succeeded in building audiences with its weekend offerings - though hopefully it does signal the start of a long overdue shake-up of the station.
Some new series did start on RTÉ Radio 1 - but nothing to get your ears burning and I can't say I noticed much new this week about Today FM and Newstalk.
Pat Boran introduced The Poetry Programme (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday) and he chose his first guest well. Author and poetry fanatic Josephine Hart, who has the most mesmerising Kensington-meets-culchie accent, brought a touch of worldly glamour to the proceedings.
Poetry programmes can be on the dry side and can come across as a little bit sneery about those of us who don't carry around slim volumes of haikus, but Hart is a woman with a mission to make poetry popular. Children, she says, never learn poems off any more. The idea of learning by heart (such a poetic expression in itself) has been swept away in the unstoppable tide of political correctness. Growing up in Ireland she learned by rote and said, "while younger people might find it incredible, people in my indeterminate age group used to recite poetry at parties".
Hart believes passionately in poetry being heard - "you love it once you hear it" - so last year she put together a series of glamorous sounding readings in London (now published on CD). The prospect of the likes of Harold Pinter reading Philip Larkin and Roger Moore hamming it up reciting Kipling meant that the events were booked out three months in advance.
Alex James, member of Britpop lynchpins Blur, was a surprising addition to the roster of presenters on On Your Farm (BBC Radio 4, Sunday). He lives in a house, a very big house in the country, and has serious ambitions to create a model farm out of his 200 acres. "All those things I abhorred and shunned and wrote songs about hating, I'm now embracing."
He doesn't yearn for the rock'n'roll days - "as you grow older it gets inelegant to be a mess at nine o'clock in the morning" - and admits that when he left his Covent Garden flat for the Cotswolds, "I was a complete idiot arriviste with a big grin on my face". That's been replaced by a great deal of earnest chat about cheese-making and ditch-digging. "It's townies," said James, now 38 and married with three children, "arriving down the country, doing nichey things, that are bringing in the money. I have never been as busy as I am now, even at the peak of Britpop madness" - music to the ears of farmers everywhere.
As someone who works most of the week from home, Zoe Williams's new series Working from Home (BBC Radio 4, Monday) had instant appeal - but rather disappointingly, all of Williams's contributors were a bit censorious of wearing your pyjamas all day. One woman, a life coach - wouldn't you know - advised wearing make-up just to make you feel more businesslike. Can't imagine that the civil servant who works with the curtains closed for fear the sight of a bit of sunshine and the back garden would lure him out to cut the grass is too missed by his office-bound colleagues.
The upshot of the first programme - and who could disagree? - was that people who work from home were just as disciplined and productive as their office-bound peers, although Williams, a witty presenter, was honest enough to admit missing the idle chat and gossip that keeps organisations together.
Fitting perfectly with my post-Christmas attention span is Days Like This (Radio Ulster, Monday), a new series in which "ordinary people" tell of their most important life experience.
It's less than five minutes long and the first one was a moving piece by a guy who jumped into a river to save someone who had thrown himself in. Uplifting in its own downbeat way.