Is Baldi (BBC Radio 4, Friday) the Father Ted of radio? I don't mean to ask if the radio programme is as funny or, God forbid, as popular, as the Craggy Island saga. I'm just wondering if it will settle into a position analogous to the one Ted holds in popular consciousness here, whereby we all ask: how come it takes a British broadcaster to round up the Irish talent and produce such a robust take on contemporary Ireland?
Mind you, you can just about imagine Father Paolo Baldi turning up at the priests' rustic residence for one of those priceless Father Ted cameos; and this second six-episode series of Baldi even sees its eponymous Franciscan hero visit the Co Clare caves where Ted and Dougal memorably left Graham Norton (as Father Noel Furlong in his glorious "acting" days) to rot, in full verbose flow.
It tends to take rather nastier and more mysterious crimes than that, however, to rouse Dublin's Father Baldi to action. Because, you see, this is whodunnit stuff; and Baldi, played with a soft-spoken northern-English accent by David Threlfall, is an amusingly clever philosopher sleuth-priest, the bastard working-class spawn of Chesterson's Father Brown.
Lucky Baldi, he's living in an Ireland where he can trot unhindered about the place, and there's even racing at Punchestown (and a few more sinister activities besides - the journalists are only marginally less scummy than the trainers). A lucky punter, Baldi is also a ridiculously lucky sleuth. Yesterday's terrific episode saw him all-too-easily trumping the cops as he probed the apparent suicide of a dot.com entrepreneur with cash-flow problems, whose shares in life plunged off a trendy Charlotte Quay balcony: the vital clue came when one of Father Baldi's (lay) academic colleagues just happened to take him for a fellow paedophile!
Clever (but not too clever), avoiding excessive and unnecessary plausibility, rapidly dipping in and out of scenes and conversations, painting characters in broad strokes, this is engrossing and solid stuff. And it's not too neat: in episode one, the villain gets away with murder because, well, he's too rich and well-insulated politically for the Garda to get at him - and his victim is too insignificant for them to try any harder.
"Have you read any Dick Francis, Father Baldi?" this posh sleazebag suspect asks him.
"No, only St Francis," replies the semiotician priest. Ouch.
But Threlfall quietly pulls off the likes of this, with help from a top-rate supporting cast: Tina Kellegher, T.P. McKenna, Margaret D'Arcy, Owen Roe and Gerard McSorley are along for an enjoyable ride. Barry Devlin, ex-Horslips and ex-Franciscan seminarian to boot, is the creator.
There was a crowd of apparently sensible people on telly the other night, doing John Kelly's slightly wooden-panelled arts-show thingie. They were doing an awful of disagreeing, that same panel crowd, but they did find some common ground when it came to assessing RTE Radio 1's present series of Bernard Farrell plays.
The consensus seemed to be along the lines of: radio drama, wha' dat?
Radio Review readers may find this hard to believe, but I'm telling you, they seriously discussed whether it's possible to have drama that you can't actually see with your eyes. And it seemed to me that only the most enthusiastic of them ventured a "maybe".
In fairness - and without needing to glance at the listenership figures to tell us what we already know - I suppose quite a few people, especially of the non-radio-reviewer variety, rarely listen to radio drama. And also in fairness, if I were a person who never attended the "real" theatre and I were brought to see a Bernard Farrell play on stage, I probably wouldn't come out chattering about the myriad wondrous possibilities of the form, and begging to be shown another one.
This week's drama in the Farrell series was an oldie, 1992's The Final Whistle (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday). Well-drawn and duly regarded at the time, it's based on the retrospections of a heart-attack patient.
Next week's effort is a new one, and altogether lamer. Malachy's Money also has a funny retrospective structure. An oldish driving instructor (Tom Hickey), stuck in a cave after his potholing companions have given him the Graham Norton treatment, looks back on a strange intimacy with a considerably younger student, Siobhan. The framing device gets tired fast, and predictable early. While the inside of a car makes a tidy and familiar setting, the play moves along haltingly, and none of the dialogue or scenario rises above cliche; it's going well when it even rises that far.
Hickey, in particular, performs with all the conviction of an announcer reading the racing results. Indeed, he sounds very RTE, which is something of an metaphor for Malachy's patronising relationship with working-class Siobhan and her lot. (The fact that he's been "outwitted" by them only underlines the familiarity of the stereotype.)
One of the pretexts of RTE Radio 1's Heartlands documentary series is that we all think RTE is staffed solely from Dublin 4, and these programmes will set us right by demonstrating the broadcasters' more diverse origins. It's a dodgy enough premise, since for many of us it just confirms our suspicions that it takes all kinds to fill Dublin 4, that most supple of postal districts. (Well, not quite all kinds; mainly your better class of culchie, such as Malachy.)
This week's case study, Kate Shanahan, used words and sounds to paint an affectionate picture of childhood summers in Abbeydorney, Co Kerry. I particularly liked the bit about Uncle Gerard, whose conversation was peppered with striking insights and turns of phrase - lifted, Shanahan learned later, from the works of O'Casey and John B. Keane that she was performing for the local amateur-dramatic society.
Shanahan, a garda's daughter, got around a bit and could share nostalgic impressions of a number of places; but Abbeydorney was her heartland, worthy of the word "idyllic" and a spot of birdsong on the soundtrack. Perhaps these programmes aren't really about places at all, but are instead forays in the direction of that most impossible destination, the past. If they strike a false note, it's because "there's no there there", but the programme-makers are forced to dress up memory like a movie set, a Potemkin village. If nothing else, it's an intriguing and worthwhile exercise in costume design.
But their linguistic and philosophical tricks are nothing compared to the contortions performed effortlessly every day by your average US journalist. One of them was on Up All Night (BBC Radio 5 Live) in the wee hours of Thursday morning, and he told us, a propos the spy-plane incident: "China is emerging in this century as the major threat to US interests, especially in that part of the world".
That part of the world? I suppose that sounds better than saying "China".
hbrowne@irish-times.ie