Radio Review: It was end of term for many RTÉ's programmes - the summer schedule starts next week. For Outside the Box (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday), Olan McGowan gathered what he described "as a panel of guests across the disability spectrum to inform us all about correct terminology".
The lively debate showed that using the right word in a constantly evolving language and cultural environment is tricky - even the panellists disagreed on some words. There are some persistent no-nos. People don't "suffer" from a condition they have it; no one is wheelchair-bound - "what, are we tied to the chair?"; it's people with a disability not "the disabled" - "putting 'dis' in front of abled makes it sound like we can't do anything," said Wendy Murray, who is Deaf. That's Deaf with a capital D as that refers to people who are culturally Deaf - they have their own language and way of communicating and don't consider themselves "disabled". Deaf with a small "d" is a medical description. Truly, language is a minefield.
The most laughable is "wheelchair person" as if you're half-man, half-wheelchair like some science fiction character, added McGowan. A man with Down syndrome was amazed at how often he hears the word "handicapped" still used on radio and TV. And he hates it. "Firstly, I'm Michael Gannon, that's how I want to be labelled and I'm normal," he said
Bethan Colins's problem Audioscope (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) was keeping her very unruly game show contestants in check. For the final programme in the series for the blind and visually impaired, there was a quiz to test that old saw that blind people have better hearing than sighted people. The sighted team of Ryan Tubridy, Derek Mooney and Brenda Donoghue won by a mile, though it was wasn't exactly a scientific experiment as the sounds were a little on the esoteric side - water being poured on a hot pan, a man throwing a javelin. "We'll see you in September," said Collins, herself a blind person, at the end of a very entertaining show, proving that she doesn't get bogged down in language.
I managed to get through about half of The State We Are In: Gender (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday) before being so overwhelmed by numbing boredom that I had to give up. It's not the subject - what woman wouldn't love listening, if only for the sheer head-shaking aggravation of it all, to a programme highlighting the Everest of inequality experienced by women in the workforce. But this trudged along like a worthy, fact-filled lecture in a very stuffy hall. Niall Crowley, chief executive of The Equality Authority, was a laid-back, clear-sounding presenter, but he was very badly served by the dull, formulaic, old-fashioned production.
First, the man from the Central Statistics Office gave some figures - women are still earning up to one third less than their male counterparts; in Sweden, 50 per cent of parliamentary representatives are women, in Ireland it's a miserable 13 per cent . . . Then came the women's voices - the women with disabilities, (tick), the gay woman (tick), the immigrant woman (tick). A producer that makes a programme that is so by the book really should go to a more modern library.
No one seems to have told Ombudsman Emily O'Reilly that there's a glass ceiling or if they did, she probably assumed they were talking about an interesting architectural feature. On Snapshots (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday), she came across as our very own Nigella of the boardroom - without all that finger-licking business. Houseful of kids, a career so stellar a CV couldn't do justice to it, fabulous husband and she can play the piano - real having-it-all stuff. And to top it all she sounded so nice and decent and downright normal, you just have to like her.
The same is probably true of Jane Fonda, who got an entire Marian Finucane programme to herself on Wednesday to plug her new book. It was broadcast from London (with the technical glitches that involves), presumably to fit in with Fonda's promotional schedule. Hollywood interviews being the least honest versions of the form - does anyone ever really expect these image building, interview-practiced people to deviate from the script in any way? This reviewer found it much more interesting to hear her straightforward reading from her autobiography, My Life So Far on Book of the Week (BBC Radio 4, daily).
It's end of term too for Leaving Cert students and they should take heart from the story of Dr Johnson, who compiled the first dictionary of the English language 250 years ago. In Hail to the Harmless Drudge (BBC Radio 4, Sunday), we heard he dropped out of college after the first year but still managed to produce a dictionary with 40,000-plus entries that wasn't surpassed until the 20th century; and that he managed to write a 600-word, definitive description of an elephant without having actually seen one.