Just far enough away

FAIR dues to Today With Pat Kenny (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). The show hasn't been setting the world on fire, but last week's feature on abortion was a worthwhile look at the workings of the latest "Irish solution".

Okay, it opened with that patronising Saw Doctors' song - the "girl" on "the boat" is generally a woman on a plane, lads - and got a bit mixed up with regional reports on pregnancy counselling around the State. But at its heart was a fine piece of reporting from Barbara Jordan: she managed to get into Brixton clinics and talk to several Irish women about their experiences and attitudes.

Without any tape of her conversations, it lacked the immediacy of Marian Finucane's great documentary from a few years back. However, Jordan's findings were intriguing: none of the women had used any of the now legal Irish referral services; none of them would get an abortion in Ireland if it were decriminalised. In both cases, loss of anonymity was the key fear - though ironically, the women took pleasure and comfort in sharing clinic rooms with other Irish women.

Jordan's report set off the inevitable debate, but it had the intimate, slightly irrational ring of truth about it.

At the Radio Ireland launch last week, the station's chief executive, Dan Collins, talked about a flexible approach to documentaries and features, one that doesn't require every subject getting the same length of time. Now, this could have been taken as a rationalisation for a published Monday to Friday schedule that, in spite of some promising presenters, could be nicknamed "Daylite", with just two 15 minute news bulletins and no designated documentary slot. All the same, it came to mind during Essentially For Women (RTE Radio 1, Thursday), 45 minutes on the joys of "oriental" belly dancing in Ireland. (How sadly appropriate that the programme blurb and a couple of its contributors used the meaningless catch all "oriental" to describe an activity that figures with lascivious prominence in racist Western images of "the East". However, at least one - Algerian - speaker pointed out that there are great differences in the art between, for example, north Africa,

Turkey and Lebanon.)

Apart from being too long and a little vague about the provenance of belly dancing, Essentially For Women was a lovely piece of work, taking its practitioners well clear of the realm of "erotic dancing", while highlighting their experience of freedom, sensuality and self expression. Maureen Carroll interviewed a bellyful of dancers, from the beginner who had been at a loose end when her line dancing classes ended to the professional.

Aodan O Dubhghaill's production was often delightful, from the opening - little finger bells ringing between soundbites from interviewees - to the gorgeous use of music throughout.

Even the most experienced dancers seemed to agree there is no need to get caught up in theory - just get undressed and start moving. Indeed, one enthusiast was keen to claim her art as the most basic form of female expression, going back "millions of years", taken from the rhythms of love waking, of menstruation, of child bearing, of the earth itself.

She'd want to ask Jane Goodall about all that. The woman whose amazing field work over three decades in Tanzania has made her and the chimpanzees of Gombe world famous was Barbara Myers's guest on Eureka (BBC Radio 4, Sunday). She reminded listeners that the Gombe project started as part of the Leakeys' famed research into human origins; Louis Leakey reckoned that behaviours' we share with the nearest surviving relatives of homo sapiens could reasonably be ascribed to our common ancestor.

This sort of investigation is cursed with public misunderstanding. Only recently, for example, an Irish Times caption jovially referred to a baby orang utan as a man's "remote ancestor". Of course a baby anything can hardly be anyone's ancestor, but even as species orang utans and chimps are our cousins, not our forebears; they too have evolved from the point where the branches on our family tree separated - though perhaps with less dramatic consequences for the planet.

Jane Goodall obviously knows we didn't evolve from chimps. Still, she is quick to span the millions of years back to Granny Primate. We can learn about, for example, human family relations by observing her friends in the trees, she told Myers with total confidence. And the possibility that what Goodall called "war" between groups of chimps is just coincidentally similar to the human version - rather than the same thing based on our shared genetic codes - was scarcely entertained.

Me, I'm not entirely convinced Jane Goodall is on the right track. She talked a lot about conservation, and the need to involve indigenous people in preserving wildlife. But this seemed to mean educating them to appreciate chimps, rather than ensuring they have enough land, money and food to turn away from tree felling and chimp hunting. I love chimps. I just don't want to confuse them with - or prefer them to - a species whose culture includes war and belly dancing, and the means to argue about their meanings.