Sobering tales of trauma and grief

RadioReview: Re-enactments of the goings-on at the various tribunals are the highlight of Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTÉ Radio 1, Mon-Fri) but whoever had the idea of giving the same dramatic treatment to the Dr Michael Neary fitness to practise hearings before the Medical Council was inspired. It's simply horrifying.

Every evening for the past two weeks actors have been reliving the hearings - female voices reading the testimonies of the women who bravely came forward to tell how the Drogheda doctor violated them, and then a male reading Neary's self-assured sounding responses.

While the news reports last week tended to focus on figures - the high number of hysterectomies Neary carried out - the testimonies vividly described an atmosphere in the hospital where the women were made to feel like pieces of meat in the face of Neary's superiority. "The crib is gone but the playpen is still there" was how the removal of her womb was explained to one woman.

Also tapping into the power of radio is The Ray D'Arcy Show (Today FM, Mon-Fri) which commissioned Cawley Nea Advertising to come up with an anti-drink driving campaign. The agency devised four ads and D'Arcy played them on Thursday so that listeners could choose the one they felt was the most effective.

Creative director Pearse McCaughey stressed that the broadcast time - weekends between 9pm and 4am - and the target audience of young males in their cars dictated the language used and the in-your-face approach. They were suitably shocking - far removed from the typical public service announcements, which D'Arcy said tend to have "schoolteachery, preachy voiceovers". The Today Fm computer system froze with the volume of callers, many of whom told how a road death in the family had affected their lives. Some listeners criticised the ads' end-line where D'Arcy uses "the F-word" - somewhat unnecessary I thought as the actual content of the ads was so gut-wrenchingly strong. One listener pointed out that in some parts of the country calling someone an "effin eejit" is virtually a compliment.

The ad eventually chosen by listeners featured a young man giving a typical "he was a great guy" eulogy at a drink-driving friend's funeral before changing tack mid-speech to point out how stupid and selfish his friend was because he not only killed himself but his girlfriend as well. "If he wanted to kill himself, fine, let him, but he didn't have to take Tracy with him." Hopefully, when played this weekend, it'll make for sobering listening.

Theo Dorgan is back with a new series of interviews with The Invisible Thread (Lyric FM, Sunday) and if the choice of guests for the first two instalments is a sign of things to come, we're in for an eclectic line-up. Security analyst and journalist Tom Clonan was first in the chair for what turned out to be a less-than-riveting interview, with Dorgan's soulful line of questioning not quite reaching the one-time soldier. This week's interview with artist Anne Madden was much more successful, and the half-hour wasn't long enough to explore properly what has been a fascinating life. Someone should sign her up to write her autobiography so that the full stories of her meetings with Chagall and Miró, touched on in the programme, as well as her friendship with Beckett, can be told. An amusing raconteur, she explained that she was a shy sort of person until she met Francis Bacon. "There's nothing more ridiculous than a shy old woman or a man," he told her, "and that cured me".

It will be interesting to hear how RTÉ's announcement this week that "religion" is to have its own category of programming will play out. I'll eat my earphones if there isn't an eight-part "religions of the world" series in some dreary low-listenership slot. Although I am looking forward to hearing how the station covers all bases by appealing to the "I'm not religious but I'm a very spiritual person" sort of listener.

Feargal Keane's Something Understood (BBC R4, Sunday) worked superbly on that level. Each week different presenters examine some of the larger questions of life - in Keane's case grief - by taking a spiritual theme and exploring it through music, prose and poetry. There were excerpts from Joan Didion's haunting Year of Magical Thinking, John McGahern's Memoir and Raymond Carver's Summer Fog, as well as music as diverse as Herbert Howells's heartbreaking Requiem aeternam from Hymnus Paradisi - written after the death of his nine-year-old son - and Frank Sinatra singing I'll Never Smile Again. It was a moving and melancholy exploration of a theme that never strayed from the central truth articulated at the start of the programme that "grief is the price we pay for love".