Radio Review: At the end of the documentary Surviving Suicide: A Mother's Story (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday), an announcer gave out the number of the Samaritans, but I'm sure that the person those affected by this powerful documentary would really love to talk to was Phil Robinson.
On an August night in 1996 her 19-year-old son, PJ, went out to the shed in the yard of the family home in Birr, Co Offaly and killed himself. His dad, Tony, found him the following morning. It took three full years before Phil could bring herself to crawl out from under the numbing weight of grief, to stop talking to PJ every day, and to try to restore some sense of normality to her life. In the years since, she has studied bereavement counselling and clearly has an insight into suicide that must make her a comfortingly empathetic figure. But despite her understanding of how she survived her son's death, there was the sense that the question "why?" still hangs like a grey pall of smoke over her house.
PJ was training to be a nurse, he had loads of good friends, he was in a boyband and he was, says his mother, "grand, lovely, handsome". He didn't seem to have any problems and the couple "grew up with their children" so there was nothing, she said, that they couldn't talk to their parents about. She read out a poem she had written, a rhyming essay really, putting simple words to the tragic events of that summer's day. Her story was intercut with the voices of a bereavement counsellor and a consultant psychologist. Suicide, said one, is not something you can get over, not something you can put behind you.
"There's nobody to blame," said Phil, "so what you do is turn the blame back on yourself." This was never going to be a documentary offering a simplistic view of its subject or suggesting easy solutions. Grieving a suicide is different from other deaths, said one of the experts, in that "you have to give yourself however long it takes to forgive the person for leaving you the way they did." Her son's death changed every member of the family forever, said Phil.
With suicide an everyday feature of Irish life, this was an insightful documentary. It was also a poignant counterbalance to Five Seven Live (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday), where young Kerryman Billy Burke, a cystic fibrosis sufferer in search of a transplant, was literally pleading for his life. "I'm not afraid of dying," he told Rachel English, "I just want to be given a chance to live." No one who heard Burke speak in his breathless, broken-voiced way will easily forget him but it's equally difficult to get your head around living in a society where a dangerously ill man has to go on a drivetime radio programme in the hope that the powers that be will be so shamed by the media spotlight that they'll do something.
There was lightness this week amid all the gloom. It was earnestly-asked questions such as "Wendy. Fidelity. Is it dead?" that made The Morning After (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday) sound like a hilarious parody of a daytime TV talk show, though I'm absolutely sure that's not what presenter Evelyn O'Rourke was hoping for. The new Sunday morning programme sets out with the lofty aim of tackling the "dilemmas of modern life" and this week it was, yawn, the Posh 'n' Becks saga. The idea is that three panellists discuss an issue while O'Rourke keeps it all going with pacy interjections and upbeat links. She does her bit really well but it's all rather pointless. Asked what he thought might happen to Posh now, Tim Mooney began ponderously: "Well, I don't live her life . . ." (No, Tim, really?) and Wendy Hederman put on her feminist hat a little askew by asking why, when it comes to affairs, it seems the "girls" are the ones to blame. The show encourages callers - on Sunday morning? - so we had one cranky-sounding man banging on about what he called - or maybe even his own invention - Female Prostitute Syndrome. It sounded like a programme that wandered into the radio centre in Montrose looking for a late night slot on 2FM but accidentally got lost somewhere entirely different.
At least Wax On (BBC Radio 2, Saturday) delivers what it promises: a good laugh. Ruby Wax mightn't be to everyone's taste but she's undeniably funny and in this new series she's compiling clips from the best female stand-ups (though it's the ever-mouthy Wax who manages to have the best lines).
After the theft of her fur coat, a kind person from Victim Support contacted her, asking if there was anything they could do to help. "Sure, get me 3,000 racoons and Pierre Cardin," quipped Wax.
