Oh yes, we've been burned more than once by the promising descriptions and pathetic reality of what BBC Radio 2 sees fit to call music documentaries. A case in progress at the moment is Millennium Jazz with Courtney Pine (Wednesday), a six-part history of the genre, at just a half-hour a pop, in which the saxophonist awkwardly reads from an uninspired, uninformative script between terrific but familiar and badly-explained bits of the music. With Jazz Century available every Saturday all year on BBC Radio 3, why would anyone bother with this - except, perhaps, to pick up a smattering of cocktail-party "knowledge"? When, on Wednesday evening, the same clip of Louis Armstrong playing West End Blues that had aired last week on Millennium Jazz turned up near the start of Jerry Wexler - Soul Man (BBC Radio 2), I got that queasy sense that the documentary assembly line was back at work.
Thankfully, this three-hour series is in a different class entirely, defined by the knowledge of its presenter, the inimitable John Peel, and the extraordinary New York articulacy of its subject and chief interviewee, Wexler himself.
Wexler is the producer, and sometimes songwriter, from Atlantic Records who was behind some of the great classics of early rock 'n' roll (notably the Drifters) and 1960s soul (notably most people worth mentioning). If his credits also include the likes of Bob Dylan's born-again Slow Train Coming, he can scarcely be blamed for being the man with the soulful sound.
Less famously, and somewhat guiltily it seems, he coined the euphemistic category label, "rhythm and blues". It all started when this boy from Washington Heights (we used to insist that this white neighbourhood towering over the ghetto be called "Harlem Heights") left the army in 1945, aged 28, feeling like "some kind of cosmic foul-up".
He took the well-worn cosmic-foul-up route into journalism, reviewing music for Billboard - where the famous hit-record charts were divided into "Pop", "Hillbilly" and "Race". Some folks, commies no doubt, reckoned the latter two terms might be considered offensive. "Nice Nellyism crept in," Wexler says. (Isn't "Nice Nellyism" much better than "Political Correctness"?) "For me, the term `race records' is a wonderful description - it says what it means," says Wexler, wistfully considering the consequences if he'd earned even a penny a record for coming up with the new "R&B" moniker. "Our rubrics now were designed not to offend anybody." He subsequently served countless black artists, developing their sound and promoting their records tirelessly. Relationships with radio DJs were especially vital: "There were quid pro quos in various forms, some of which were even legal . . ."
It would be lovely to hear even half this spirit and honesty in a programme like Gypsies, Tinkers and Travellers (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday, repeated tonight). However, call me a bigoted Eurosceptic, but something about it appearing in the "Network Europe" slot filled me with doubt, if not dread, that such a programme would really be racy of the soil.
This offering came from BBC Radio Scotland and dealt specifically with the travelling community in Scotland. Apart from their accents and the fact that among their traditional crafts is pearl-fishing (really, pearlfishing), the tales of tradition and discrimination could easily have come from Irish travellers.
However, the programme confused matters by bringing in tales of Romany travellers in 16th-century Scotland, while still insisting today's travellers are indigenous Scots. One (settled) contributor blew back the mists of time far enough to suggest that travellers are descended from ancient hunter-gatherers who were pushed to the fringes of Europe by land-grabbing pastoralists. At least one traveller interviewed had absorbed this wisdom: "we look like the Indians . . ." Another felt, happily, culturally superior to her settled husband: "All he's got is football, and tartan". Lines like this, and some lovely singing, made this documentary worth hearing; ultimately, however, it was a clear case of Nice Nellyism.
After several weeks in which Play of the Week (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday) featured drama adapted from the stage with greater or lesser degrees of comfort, this week's choice "from the archives" (well, it is the end of July) was particularly astute.
Stephen Buck's Intercom suffers from a couple of the old Radio Drama flaws, notably actors who, while attentive to character, are a little slack on the nuances of language; and a tendency towards an over-worked, over-tidy, over-happy conclusion. Nonetheless, it is a perfect, and at times perfectly delightful, example of what can be done far better in a radio studio than on a stage.
From its subject matter (eavesdropping) and its settings (a bed, a car) to its rhythm (rapid but low-key shifts) and its mode of revelation (what you hear is not necessarily what you get), Intercom is an ode to the unique qualities of the medium.
It also appreciates something about the aural-voyeurism of the radio listener. We really don't need a "cheering interest" character - not in the way film-goers and telly-watchers are supposed to. Go on, give us narky, flawed Frank, who scarcely notices the needs of his heavily pregnant wife and complains about the sweet old woman he drives to work - we'll pick him apart as surely as we do the callers to Liveline.
Frank and the missus are being kept awake by the nocturnal conversations and video-watching noises of their elderly, highly romantic neighbours - sounds that, unaccountably, are suddenly piped through the apartment intercom, and only at night. Then Frank has to face old Mrs Byrne, complete with interminable chats about old film stars, every morning when he gives her a lift to their jobs in the Department of Social Welfare.
The plot is reasonably clever, the sense of intimacy suitably discomfiting. Finally, for anyone who has ever signed on the dole, it's a bit of fantasy-fulfilment about the empty lives of the gits behind the hatch!