Xenophobia? Not on what Gerry Ryan fondly calls "your nelly". The young people of Ireland, it seems, positively prefer foreigners - at least if the alternative is an Irish person of the opposite sex.
Go on, lad, put on a Liverpool accent in the pub. Girls, pretend to be a gaggle of French students down at the disco. You'll "pull" far better than you would with your more natural Irish ways. At any rate, that's what callers were telling Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday).
This topic arose from a story in Another Newspaper alleging that Irishmen felt consistently put down and sneered (Today FM, Monday to Friday) Navan Man, testing the hypothesis, managed to provoke only varying modes of rejection when he tried his limited charms on an Irish girl and a Sloane.) Anyway, the numerous Irish women who called Gerry tended, unintentionally, to confirm the "research" findings about their fussiness and cruelty.
"There's very few Irish men you'll meet who aren't pathetic," one said. "I've lately started, instead of going by looks, going by smell," another lamented. (That's Navan Man right out of the picture, then.) A miserable-sounding Scot called Scott made a persuasive case for the difficulty of getting through to Irish women.
Gerry oozed sympathy: "It sounds like the most bleak, appalling pursuit imaginable to man." The Ryanline conversation wandered a lot, as it does.
A commercial traveller named Richard reckoned that the women of Nenagh, Co Tipperary, are the most attractive and "obliging" in Ireland, and he makes it his business to stop there in his travels. (Anything to do with the resemblance of the town's name to that of a well-mannered foreign woman?) Gerry was largely loyal to his gender, challenging one defensive woman caller: "So, are you saying there are no smug, aggressive, Machiavellian women out there at all?" "There's no which?" "There's no nasty girls..."
Philip Boucher-Hayes's guests in his summer stint on Today with... (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) are more likely to recognise the word "Machiavellian". And PBH himself certainly comes across as a bright and literate chap who might have two or three other big words in him, likely to burst out at any moment.
As an extraordinarily cheerful Mary O'Rourke (taking part in Today with...'s "Newshound" quiz) told PBH she's been hearing around the place from various people: "That show's going well for whatcha-call-your-man." Fair dues to whatcha-call-your-man, he's survived his association with the Radio Ireland catastrophe, when he was the brash young host of a daily arts show on the unlistened-to national station, to thrive in Radio 1 as a paying-his-dues apprentice. (He's also rather ostentatiously paying his obeisances to his elders and betters, as evidenced in last week's Irish Times Magazine interview.)
Not that he's a soft touch as an interviewer. Boucher-Hayes wraps his aggression in a couple of layers of good nature, but he's tough and to the point as a presenter, probably the best of the younger cohort at RT╔. He's perhaps not as good at the craft of shaping a live studio discussion as he is at producing a polished package as a reporter; in either role, however, we can hope to be enjoying his skills for many years to come.
On Wednesday, he handled a potentially awkward moment with aplomb, employing Kennyesque disdain to address a listener who had left a message disapproving of a fairly pedestrian item discussing gay role models. This "John" reckoned Boucher-Hayes shouldn't be promoting homosexuality, seeing as it "goes against nature". "John," said Philip, "I know I'm not supposed to have an opinion...but I think the debate has moved on from there..." That turned out to be wishful thinking, to judge by the handful of bigots who followed John on the comment line, moaning about the use of the licence fee to promote unnatural, unhealthy behaviour. Michael Portillo had better hope PBH's listeners aren't Tory electors preparing for a return from exile. Far be it from RT╔ to go against nature. On the contrary, Radio 1 has bought further into the strange but burgeoning genre of wildlife radio, bringing us a new summer series of documentaries called World Wild (RT╔ Radio 1, Wednesday), produced by (who else?) Derek Mooney.
NOW your doubting Thomases in the audience are always going to have a problem with wildlife radio. I mean, when David Attenborough does a TV show, we know that he and/or his long-suffering crew have stuck it out on the tundra or the steppe, in the icy sea or a fetid pond, because we can see the evidence with our own eyes. But let's face it, when Don Conroy in South East Radio's excellent recent Wild Ireland series told us breathlessly about the badgers he was tracking, or even broadcast from Banagher the sound of the corncrake, why should we credit it? Faith, I believe it's called. And while both credulity and the power of the mind's eye are put to the test by such programmes, at their best they can have an unmistakable magic.
This week's World Wild put the magic at risk by wearing its learning so prominently. Noted radio ornithologist (now there's a nice job description) Dr Richard Collins took his tape deck to North America - or so he'd have us believe - to find out about the trumpeter swan, the world's heaviest flying animal, which has been brought back from the brink of extinction in recent decades.
The old trumpeting was a stroke of luck from a radio standpoint.
Beats heck out of our mute swan, anyway. But Collins didn't rely on swan noise alone; he filled the programme with a sense of movement and energy to tell the extraordinary story of how American scientists have upped and moved these swans thousands of miles in order to repopulate the continent with them. (The bird was left off the US endangered species list precisely to accommodate this sort of interference; the protection afforded by labelling them "endangered" might have "killed them with kindness", as Collins noted with due irony.) What's more, the scientists have had to get a grip on what makes trumpeter swans tick, because the bird boffins must "teach" displaced swans to migrate properly.
Teach? Yep, they stuck a "trumpeting" old car horn on a white ultralight aircraft, to fulfil the airborne role of surrogate parent. "What we're trying to do," one conservationist said, "is impose our will on their genetic blueprint." I hope the scientists won't mind me saying that this is really what I call magic.
Hang on tight now for the segue: another large American migratory creature is actor-playwright Roger Gregg, and his recent radio work is pure magic too. Thriving (and successfully reproducing) in Ireland, Gregg is also using his "audio theatre" work to recolonise his native territory. That's one (kind of stupid) way to look at Gregg's latest news.
His bizarrely wonderful Tread Softly Bill Lizard, after its spell baffling and amusing RT╔ Radio 1 audiences on Saturday mornings, slipped off to the US to win the Gold Mark Time Award from the American Society for Science Fiction Audio as the "best science-fiction audio production on the planet". (George Bush would be proud of that global vision.) And fans of his more straightforwardly hilarious Invasion from Planet Vampire, the once-off live radio play he performed last winter with his colleagues in Crazy Dog Audio Theatre, also have happy tidings. RT╔ has scheduled a new six-part series of this sort of nonsense, Big Big Space!, for the autumn. Basically, the actors, musicians and FX guy will do their thing for a live audience in D·n Laoghaire on October 13th, 20th and 27th, and then the shows will go out on Saturday mornings from about that time to late November.
As old-style radio goes, I'm much more excited about Big Big Space! than about the much-hyped Town Hall Tonight revival. But hey, so long as live radio is being revived, are we going to start being exclusive of some shades of audio colour? Not on your nelly.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie