Radio Review: Film-maker and writer Neil Jordan gave a fascinating insight into how he works with actors in Masterpiece (BBC World Service, Tuesday). The interviewer, Harriet Gilbert, commented that whether his reviews were good or bad, they rarely failed to mention how well he worked with actors.
Jordan talked about schoolboy Eamon Owens, who delivered a stunning performance in The Butcher Boy. First he gave Owens the script for a read through in a studio, "somewhere like this actually", said a soft-voiced Jordan; then he took the first-time actor around the locations for another complete read through, capturing the performance on a video camera and on it went. By the time it came to the actual shoot, the boy was so familiar with the words and the story - and, implicitly, the obviously demanding director - that he could concentrate on the business of acting.
"It's most satisfying to work with people who have never acted before," said Jordan, who said he began making movies in the mid-1980s because no one else was doing it and, "to point a camera at the landscape of Ireland".
There's always something chilly sounding about these Masterpiece interviews and it's not just that Harriet Gilbert sounds like the headmistress of a posh boarding school interviewing the lacrosse team, it's more the way she interacts or rather doesn't interact with her guests. Jordan frequently ends sentences with "isn't it?" or "isn't there?" - it could be a conversational tic but it did sound like an invitation for dialogue, something that Gilbert doesn't engage in and it's easy to get the idea that she has a list of questions on a clipboard that she's going to get through no matter what, ticking them off briskly as she goes.
Olivia O'Leary, however, is a truly engaging interviewer. Her guests on Between Ourselves (BBCR4, Tuesday) were art forger John Myatt and convicted fraudster Tod Volpe, who duped Hollywood bigwigs into buying bad, forged or non-existent works of art - Jack Nicholson was one of his better-known clients. Myatt was the more interesting of the two. Discovering he was able to copy other artists, he put an ad in Private Eye offering to paint "genuine fakes" for £150 (€226). Clients flooded in, including Professor John Drew who commissioned several pieces. So far, so legal, until the day Drew phoned to say that he had taken one of Myatt's "Giacommetti's" to Christies who offered to sell it for £25,000 (€38,000). The pair split the booty and a crime was born.
Drew's speciality was provenance - realising it's easier to put things into a reference library than to take things out, he planted details of Myatt's fakes in the Tate's files and once even offered to donate two "Mattisses" to that gallery. During the formal handover meeting, Myatt watched while white-gloved curators handled his emulsion-on-MDF creations and he only called a panicky halt to the proceedings when the curators were about to bring the paintings to the gallery's conservation department.
At times during the interview O'Leary showed her supreme confidence - or maybe experience - by sitting back and letting the art frauds swop stories about how rotten, cut-throat and rife with forgeries the art world is, before cutting in with some pointed questions.
If the two men came into the studio thinking they would be portrayed as the cheeky Arthur Daly's of the art world they had another thing coming. "You're the same grubby criminals as a pickpocket," she said, rattling the duo into corny self-serving lines of defence. "I was seduced by the dark side," drawled Volpe peevishly. "Have you betrayed art itself?" she asked. Myatt replied in a subdued tone that she was asking the sort of questions he only expects to ask of himself on his deathbed.
Kevin Hough doesn't go as deep in This is your Half Hour Call (RTÉ1, Thursday) but he does provide a very entertaining half hour of radio. Jacinta Whyte was his guest and anyone who was watching just about any RTÉ TV chat show around 20 years ago will remember the pint-sized Dublin northsider belting out songs from Annie. She grew up to build a successful career on the musical circuit in London and the songs played between the chat were from the shows she has been in, from Miss Saigon to Gypsy. She sounded lovely, whether singing or being interviewed.
Another bit of escapist entertainment is Driftwood (RTÉ1 daily), the new soap that is settling in just fine after its first two weeks. It's a heck of a task - establishing a large cast of characters, intertwining story lines and creating a fictitious landscape in eight-minute daily bursts, but it zips along as an excellent mid-morning diversion. I understand the point of moving it from the traditional lunchtime soap spot (to test a new audience apparently) - but instead of eating into Summer Days, why not take the eight minutes off John Creedon - he could do with the lift.
