Radio Review: Was Marian Finucane (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) really that broken that it needed such a radical fix? It has lost some listeners but in a highly competitive radio market it is not alone in that, and it is still, for certain, one of RTÉ radio's top programmes, yet it came back from the Christmas break with a strange, bitty new format.
It now starts directly after Morning Ireland, then Finucane introduces the 9 a.m. news. So before she has even started, the flow is broken. After that there's a bit of chat and - the first big change - a pop song. Surely listeners tune in to a programme such as this because they want talk radio - so why the sudden need for a token song?
The programme then gets out of the studio, so, on Monday, its new reporter, Fergus Sweeney, went to Sallins to talk to a group of women who fundraised for their children's school by posing for a calendar. The shtick was that he was blindfolded because the women may (or may not) have been in a state of undress. Sounds a bit of gas? It wasn't - suffice to say, they won't be making Calendar Girls, Part Two in Co Kildare. It wasn't entirely the women's fault that they came across as so dreary, Sweeney doesn't have the bantering light touch that this sort of stuff needs.
Things got worse on Tuesday when the "people item" came from a supermarket, with what felt like an interminable piece on a woman who spends her days in Superquinn trying to spot mistakes, out-of-date produce and so on, claiming Feargal Quinn's 40-cent bounty for each error. Back in the studio Finucane got a call from a woman who washes and re-uses tinfoil, so she announced a competition for the thriftiest listener. On Wednesday, the "people item" had moved to the 24-hour Tesco (another supermarket!) in Bray for an interview with a shopper at 4 a.m. Despite being slightly worse for wear he had the perspicacity to say to the interviewer, this time Nuala O'Neill, that he hoped "she was getting well paid for it".
Finucane gamely tried to sound up for all this leaden trivia, but the new format really doesn't play to her considerable broadcasting strengths. Things only started to make sense in the second half of each programme when she was allowed slip back into her more familiar mode, one day interviewing Spike Milligan's agent, Norma Farnes, and another Maureen Gaffney.
By Thursday, I'd abandoned Marian Finucane entirely in favour of Ian Dempsey (Today FM, Tuesday to Friday) and not just because of the hilarious new advertising campaign for the radio station that started this week, but if you're going to listen to music and a bit of light entertainment, you may as well listen to someone who is a natural at it.
Later that day, Tales at the Crossroads (RTÉ Radio 1, Thursday) began, and it's a little gem. "As the woman said, I don't believe in fairies, but they're there all the same," said producer/presenter Nuala Hayes by way of introduction to the first programme of the six-part series, which she made while artist-in-residence in Co Laois in 2002. There was a strong, sense of capturing the powerful local oral history of the midlands before the only people who can tell it are gone. The style is informal, with Hayes going from house to house not so much interviewing as letting people - some of them octogenarians - tell their stories, which this week told of the power of ghosts, fairy forts and banshees. Music by Ellen Cranitch perfectly complemented the sensitive style of production.
World in Your Ear (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday) presented the best, quirkiest radio from around the world and Roger Gregg's Crazy Dog Audio Theatre was chosen for inclusion, alongside a soap opera from Egypt (in which all the actors spoke, intriguingly, in the poshest received English) and a production of Hamlet by death-row inmates in the US.
So the happiest radio news of the week was that Gregg and his troupe of multi-skilled actors were back with The Apocalypse of Bill Lizard (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday). "Framed by the proscenium arch of your ear and lit by the spotlight of your mind's eye" (Gregg is nothing if not poetic), the series is a four-part, weird and wonderful "audio noir". Radio 4 described Crazy Dog as "truly radio in another dimension, a multitude of sound effects, music and characters", and this Bill Lizard adventure is all that, with an energy and inventiveness that makes other radio dramas sound anaemic.
Gumshoe Bill Lizard and his sidekick/ alter ego Cyril, the invisible rabbit-shaped pooka, are approached by a husky femme fatale who sends them on a search for a scroll (or something). Even if you missed last week's show, that's all you need to know to tune in this morning and be transported to another audio dimension.
