Dancing on a pinhead

He's a hard-working man, is Vincent Browne. While he's prepared to delegate some minor tasks to his talented team (annoyed phone calls to radio columnists, for instance), he gets stuck into an enormous range of business.

Nowadays the RTE Radio 1 schedule presents us a picture of Vincent mopping his brow after another bruising Tonight with . . . programme, perhaps squeezing in a pint or two at the RTE social club, then legging it down to the studio to grapple with theologians on the Bible-discussion programme Midnight Court.

Okay, Midnight Court is obviously pre-recorded (you'd never get theologians to stay up that late). It certainly doesn't find Vincent in mellow, Val Joyce mood - in the handful of shows I've heard so far Browne does his bloody-minded best to set off sparks with, so far, a feminist and a more orthodox liberal-sounding priest. It doesn't always work, and the individual programmes are too short, but it's a great millennial idea with the perfect host to pull it off, if you ask me. And you did.

Nope, I don't succumb to the professional fallacy that suggests that expert Christian believers are the only folk qualified to argue about religion. On the other hand, maybe Browne should leave the acting to the actors; one night last week he couldn't resist a further expansion of his job description.

Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday) was last week's place to be, what with "a preview of tomorrow's papers" being unintentionally joined by a preview of tomorrow's tribunal. Slip-ups aside, the programme was indispensable for actor Joe Taylor's nightly reading from James Gogarty's testimony.

But on Tuesday Browne's enthusiasm for Taylor's impersonation spilled over into imitation, as the host slipped into a new accent and re-recreated Gogarty's unforgettable passage climaxing "Will we, f. . k!" (surely the "mature recollection" of this more profane scandal-era). Then he roared at the good of it. No, he wasn't as good as Taylor, but while most journalists cheer-lead for the Flood team, and Eamon Dunphy leads strongly with his doubts, Browne is making sure this tribunal won't be boring.

The summer book-series on RTE Radio 1, Reading in the Shade, was among the more popular recent innovations on the station. Concentrating as it did on recent Irish work, work that was read for the programme largely by its authors, the programme had a consistently live and engaging texture.

Probably the most popular of its readers was Nuala O'Faolain, reading from her Are You Somebody? Personally, I found it too gut-wrenchingly personal to survive the week. (I did get appreciatively through the book.)

The idea is back for Book on One (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), but minus the same, contemporary-Irish emphasis. A fortnight ago, John McGahern reading from The Barracks - a novel that anticipated too many 1990s court reports - brought me back to that O'Faolain pain. All the same, I'm not quite sure this series works. Perhaps as a happy resident of long summer holidays I have an exaggerated sense of the difference between the seasons; if beautiful prose very well read can grab listeners whatever the weather, why was I so indifferent to Mick Lally last week intoning Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea?

Yes, the shift in emphasis from newish Irish books is understandable for the long haul. By all means let's give this a chance, like all the other Radio 1 novelties. I'm just wary, is all, of these wee Beebish stabs at Culture.

Regular students of the politics and aesthetics of this column won't be surprised at its pilgrimage to American Trilogy (BBC Radio 2, Saturday). Billy Bragg profiling Bruce Springsteen? Yes, please.

But this documentary was more beat-up old Buick than pink Cadillac. What sounded like the outtakes from last month's interview on the same station with a self-involved Springsteen were linked by familiar song clips and tired narrative soundbites from a bored-sounding Bragg. (His cliched assertion that Springsteen's E Street Band was the "tightest, most entertaining band on the planet" would have been more convincing if it hadn't been preceded by wholesale errors in identifying the group's longstanding members.)

How much more interesting it would have been had it actually involved a conversation between the two men. Still, this was Bruce, so the programme had its moments. The passage on the genesis and production of Nebraska in 1982 included an interesting snippet from Emmylou Harris on that dark solo-album's unparalleled status - "a masterpiece" - among Springsteen's musical peers. (We also learned from the man himself about the influence of film, and particularly "the nwah stuff", in this period.)

The hard-earned cockiness of Springsteen in the late 1990s is personal and post-therapeutic rather than rock-star - e.g. his 1980s superstar phase "came at the right time" because "I didn't have my kids yet". Sweet, Bruce.