There was nothing silly about it for the passengers on that Futura Air flight (not so much the cliched "illfated" as slightly-off-colour-fated), but their "ordeal" was certainly a silly-season godsend for I-don't-like-Monday editors at Morning Ireland and the News at One (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday).
Charter passengers suffer a mid-air fright, an unscheduled landing, disruption to their journey and half-assed wee-hours care and communication from the airline and tour operator involved: clear the airwaves!
Even given Concorde-panic (a Boeing 737's engine does not, so far as I know, come equipped with after-burners for reaching supersonic speeds and occasionally spewing flames), the RTE reaction was overkill - as the next set of passengers with a terrifying gripe will learn once they contact the newsroom expecting their 15-to-30 minutes of fame, and very definitely don't get 'em. (The Star page-one is another story - a tabloid doing its sometimes hysterical job perfectly well, I would have thought.)
Morning Ireland gave the story its own version of the star treatment - hyping it for a few minutes before the weather at 7.55 a.m., then piling on the agony from the end of It Says in the Papers all the way to the (suitably delayed) 8.30 a.m. news headlines. Absurd though all this was, it at least had the benefit of being a fresh morning yarn, direct from the airport and complete with over-excited voices and more than a bit of conflict.
News at One was missing that level of news-making rationale, but still felt compelled to dump another top-story quarter-hour (at a conservative estimate) on these unpleasant events. The only novelty here was that whereas Morning Ireland featured a very slightly jittery Panorama Holidays executive, News at One heard a distinctly nervous Futura executive - presuming it was nervousness that made him use the words actually and situation repeatedly and where you'd least expect them in a syntactically sound sentence.
I don't want to get carried away knocking the news values of undoubtedly talented journalists, but there is a larger context in which we have to see the elevation, on a State public broadcasting service, of "holidaymakers' hell" to the post of undisputed biggest story in the world.
That context is, at least in part, the decline of international news on the agenda of flagship programmes like these: increasingly, "foreign" is the destination for dodgy holidays, the source of dodgy asylum-seekers and, if you count the US as foreign at all, the place where Mark Little's reports regularly coincide with the US-network consensus on identikit presidential candidates and their identikit running-mates.
THIS is not meant to be another setup for more excessive praise of The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday), the State's indisputable current-affairs flagship outside of RTE - but so be it. Eamon Dunphy's programme probably does go abroad with greater regularity than its competition, but it usually does so within limits, sticking close to the US-UK axis which is of particular fascination to its presenter.
Nonetheless, the show's curiosity and sometimes self-admiring insistence on getting "inside" the big stories does regularly extend beyond these shores, so its foreign coverage, like its domestic stuff, is almost always more engaged and engaging than that emanating from Montrose.
And when, as this week, substitute-Last Word presenter Fintan O'Toole is interviewing Robert Fisk about the 10th anniversary of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, you can listen in the confidence that there is unlikely to be a more informed and intelligent conversation on this subject taking place anywhere else in the media of the English-speaking world.
If Fisk is engaged in his story, where does that leave Eamonn McCann, who has reported superbly for The Last Word from the Bloody Sunday tribunal, and terrifically too on the John Gallagher escape? McCann is scarcely the Mark Little model "detached" observer, with Bloody Sunday in his veins and all over his CV too, but listeners know where they stand with him and know, again, that they are hearing the cutting edge of expertise on the subject.
McCann's Last Word status as journalist-participant edged up another notch this week when he discussed the controversial anti-Raytheon mural on the back of the wall at Free Derry Corner with O'Toole. The original "Welcome to Free Derry" gable end was, he readily admitted (while playing down any other history-making credentials), his own 1969 creation.
And, he assured us, "Free Derry" had nothing whatsoever to do, at the time, with Irish freedom, but was a straight lift from the pictures he'd seen from US university occupations and teach-ins - "Welcome to Free Berkeley" and so on. Hey, if an old leftie like O'Toole can host The Last Word, why not McCann?
Maybe he's already done it, but I haven't heard McCann called in on another job: to comment on the return of the Undertones for this weekend's Witnness festival. He certainly has all the rock 'n' roll and I-was-there cred to assess the new, Sharkey-free incarnation of the Derry lads who made just maybe the greatest pop record ever.
ANY event that prompts radio replays of Teenage Kicks sure can't be all bad. (Hey, Lite FM! How come the Undertones aren't on your 35-plus playlist?) This week I heard both Myles Dungan on Rattlebag (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) and Tom Dunne on Pet Sounds (Today FM, Monday to Friday) give way to that distinctive pair of drumbeats and unmistakable riff. And as Dunne strangely purred when the record was finished: "An-mhaith ar fad".
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@rish-times.ie