A Radio Ulster programme is 20 years old today, and for once the congratulations survivors get is deserved. The moment on Talkback when Helen McKendry first spoke about her mother Jean McConville's disappearance chilled and discomfited thousands who never registered the silent losses of the Troubles.
That still comes up when people talk in their own homes about things that have made them think, or rethink. There was a different kind of charge during the first Drumcree confrontation when startled, embarrassed Protestants phoned in, some from the South, to say they had just realised precisely how and why Orange marches were offensive.
If Talkback's weekday rendezvous with rant or rabbiters has become a predictable mix, blame the legion of imitators. The programme was a trailblazer in both format and material, a pioneer of "user-generated content", today's hottest tip for cheap broadcasting. It was the first Northern programme to solicit instant phoned comment - later emails and texts - and feed it all right back out again after the swiftest scan for libel. The technique seems middle-aged now only because major news bulletins use it.
But when Talkback crashed on to the air in 1986 in the midst of relentless violence and political despair, it was a brash adolescent. The signature tune alone was jarring. From prim Radio Ulster, Talkback's voices and views struck many as hideously raw and unpolished, not what many of them wanted from the BBC. In a station still dominated by small-u unionism, former broadcasting arm of the unionist government, the watchword as the 60s soured into the Troubles was to ignore or soft-pedal how differently the two parts of the community experienced events.
As staples of the new show, the original editor hired a roster of commentators to voice ideas BBC staff were not supposed to entertain. (The present writer was one contributor.) The show owed much to that first editor and his presenter, the late Barry Cowan. Cowan's sharp tongue set the pace: Martin Dillon (who went on to write best-selling shockers on the Shankill Butchers and Michael Stone) produced an audio tabloid that mixed a political daring with what he hoped would be smut. So Talkback had a "sex correspondent", who doubled as a newsreader.
One of the commentators was David Dunseith, until then a straight political correspondent. Dunseith succeeded Cowan as the programme's anchor and is now identified with it, his grouchy authority the distinguishing mark of the original model although programme-makers, and today's audiences, seem more awed by the younger, and blatantly copycat, Stephen Nolan Show: Talkback with music and shock-jock attitude.
But then Talkback itself has changed with the times. The first tabloid days evolved into a serious programme. Now the glory days of debate and lengthy interviews are long gone, relegated in the best way by the arrival of a protracted peace settlement with more downs than ups, though also by the boredom of listening to people proud that their views will never change.
It still occasionally examines events as they happen - heart-searching through a week about last September's loyalist rioting, when Orangemen stood beside people throwing petrol-bombs at police. People unused to public statements can leave lasting echoes: like the man struck that he reacted to paramilitary killing with "relief when it's not your side doing it".
Talkback was caller-led from the start, phone-ins injecting fun as well as cringe-making monologues and genuine pathos. It followed its nose, and the consumers led it away from politics towards reliable grouch material: people who don't put seat-belts on their children, dirty and scarce public toilets, buses that don't run on time, muggings. But a few months ago a riveting programme talked to prisoners, their families and warders in Magilligan Prison; and yesterday's news that almost 4,000 applications to join the Police Service of Northern Ireland have come from the Republic will bring in calls.
Dunseith long ago attracted a kind of public pity by fielding callers as long-winded as they are obtuse. When he loses patience, audiences sympathise - except those who promptly call to damn him for impertinence.
Radio as part of the fabric of daily life is familiar in Dublin, Kerry and Cork, common interests voiced in styles the listener thinks of as theirs too. Only the rarest programmes produced in the North have the same effect in Belfast, Derry and the countryside between. How could it be otherwise, since the place lacks a basic sense of shared space, commonality? Talkback made a reputation in many ways by confronting the divide, then struggled to shake off the dislikeability that came with the territory - the accusation that it was solely interested in flags and emblems, Orange versus Green. It was never only that. Before the competitors were even a gleam, it opened out radio to people who thought of the BBC as posh, and British only. That seems longer ago than 20 years.