A sporting chance to hit the heights

RadioReview: It was a good week for someone who knows almost nothing about sport to tune in to sports coverage. Between Mayo warming up in front of Hill 16, Keane and Quinn burying the hatchet (and not in each other) and speculation over whether Stan really does have a plan, it was all about the drama off the pitch rather than the actual play.

"We're in danger of paralysis by analysis," said Mickey Moran, Mayo's laconic-sounding manager (Off the Ball, Newstalk 106, Monday), clearly signalling that while the chat about his team's victory might continue on pub stools and on the airwaves, he'd already had enough of it. "Remember, we have to do it all over again," he told Eoin McDevitt, standing in for Ger Gilroy.

About an hour after the nerve-jangling battle against Dublin in, as Moran poetically put it, "a cauldron filled with 82,000 people", his team sat down and talked about the final against Kerry. Moran doesn't underestimate the task. "The kingdom are a benchmark for everyone." And no, he said - you have to believe his tongue was firmly in his cheek - he didn't tell his boys to head for Hill 16 to rattle Dublin; it wasn't gamesmanship, it was just the way it happened.

McDevitt and his sidekick Ken Early are a great blokeish double-act, sounding like two hardcore sports fanatics who can't believe their luck that they've landed their dream job. And Gift Grub, the comedy sketch slot on Breakfast with Ian Dempsey (Today FM, weekdays) is back and it hasn't lost any of its bite, particularly Thursday's sketch with Roy Keane in the Cork dressing room to give the lads a pep talk. His (or Mario Rosenstock's) version of the Dolly Parton song Jolene - now called Joe Deane - should be sung on the terraces tomorrow; it's hilarious.

Vivienne Parry explored the disturbing phenomenon of what she called "treatments looking for a condition" in Am I Normal? (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday). This week's subject was height, and she found an increasing trend to medicalise perceived lack of stature. Drug companies have spent millions developing growth hormone therapies for people suffering from rare medical conditions that lead to restricted growth. However, the fantastically expensive, invasive procedures (€50,000 and 10 years of daily hormone injections to grow two inches) have now been licensed in America for the "treatment" of people who are simply not tall. But why has shortness suddenly become a disease? The answer kept coming back to the power of the drug companies.

Erin O'Connor knows all about height. As a six-foot teenager she had a hard time in school and it wasn't helped that "the only sticky out bit that grew was my nose". She's now a supermodel with all the glam and big bucks that go with it, and she talked to Olivia O'Leary (Between Ourselves, BBC Radio 4, Tuesday) about life on and off the catwalk. In her early days as a model she was told to make her nose smaller and her boobs bigger but she ignored it, feeling she was better off being herself and that everyone could either like it or lump it. The other guest was one of the first supermodels, Carmen dell'Orefice, who has been working for six decades; Dali painted her, Cecil Beaton snapped her. She hasn't, she corrected O'Leary, "survived" in the modelling world, "I've lived beautifully".

"Talk to me about . . ." is one of O'Leary's favorite ways of framing a question, and the two models did, with thoughtfulness and ease - their wit and self-awareness blasting the "dumb model" stereotype to pieces.

After nearly 20 years as presenter of one of BBC radio's most popular and iconic programmes, Sue Lawley bowed out of Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio 4, Sunday). There have only been three presenters since the format was invented in 1942. Its creator Roy Plumley presented until his death in 1985 and was thought to be irreplaceable - a theory that nearly proved true when Michael Parkinson took it on before handing over, in 1987, to Lawley. She's to be succeeded by news presenter Kirsty Young.

This week's guest, Dame Joan Plowright, gave Lawley an appropriately posh curtain call. Her choices were melancholy and theatrical, including Over the Rainbow, Maria, and Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien. Her late husband, Laurence Olivier, made an appearance on the playlist with the St Crispin's Day speech from his 1944 film of Henry V. Given that it was Lawley's well-publicised exit from a programme that's all about memory, Plowright's book choice was, suitably enough, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.