Let's not get stuck in the past

THE liveliest debate, on the Sunday Show (RTE Radio 1) was about events of 40 years ago - specifically those at Goldenbridge - and, while Monica Barber and Louis Lentin got stuck in, the best contribution came from John Waters, critiquing the way the Fifties have been constructed as our own Dark Ages.

Nonetheless, much of RTE's output last week seemed devoted to a nostalgic variant on the notion that the recent past is another country.

Fifties bashing? John Quinn is having none of it. Goodnight Ballivor, I'll Sleep in Trim (RTE Radio 1, repeated Wednesday), his memoir of childhood in the Meath village of Ballivor, where Daddy was the Garda, was - for the most part - as pure a version of the pastoral as radio can produce, complete with sweet rhyming couplets.

Chat in the blacksmith shop, summer days cutting turf heroes on the football pitch, altar boys who slip coins from the collection plate - virtually the only conflict that entered Quinn's idyll came in nights worrying about the fate of Dick Barton, Secret Agent. If paradise might get a bit boring, there was always Jimmy Cagney in the travelling picture show and "the wireless transporting him round the globe".

Quinn is a master of the medium, and clearly knows just what he is doing. His tour de force involved the sound of a family Rosary mixed with Edward G Robinson doing Rico's last stand from Little Caesar (as seen in the Royal Cinema, Trim). The syncopation of mother's monotone and the gangster's machine gun fire was a bit obvious - with no sense, certainly, that the violence in the latter exposed latent violence in the former - but it was also brilliant radio.

Was it just a coincidence that the week's other documentary on RTE was also about growing about as a Garda's child in the 1950s? This being RTE, it just might have been. In any case, Mary Phelan's Keepsake (RTE Radio 1, Thursday) didn't benefit from its proximity to Quinn's work.

The programme was based on a nice little idea: Elma Griffin, now in her mid 40s, returns from England to guide her sister Terri Sweeney (16 years younger than her) through the terrain of the childhood they didn't share. For the early years of Elma's life, their father led a far more nomadic existence than Quinn's in Ballivor.

So while Elma glowed revisiting, for instance, an old beachside home in Ballinskelligs, her nostalgia was tainted with more than the usual sense of loss; her childhood was a series of uprootings.

Some of this was good stuff, but not good enough for 45 minutes. At times it reminded us of the inescapable banality of other people's lives if we have no broader social touchstone for them. At other times, like when Elma met an old flatmate and reminisced about Rathmines a quarter century ago, the material was all too familiar.

It was back the mid 1940s for Touch and Go (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday), Sam McAughtry's play about Belfast in the aftermath of the second World War.

Having started the short season of 90 minute dramas with an acknowledged masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, RTE Drama has admirably turned its attention to lesser works of some particular interest. Touch and Go has plenty wrong with it over hasty plot development, not one but two hoors with hearts of gold, cliche's about the eccentric fellowship of drunk.

However, director Daniel Reardon has done a fine job of mining McAughtry's better elements: his frank treatment of sexuality; ideas about armed forces snobbery; accounts of the power of the Unionist Party to deliver jobs for the boys; even a mini riot in Dundalk's train station when Free State customs officers confiscate the packages of Northern women who have been shopping for unrationed goods. There was nothing rose tinted about this blast from the past.

But back to the nostalgia: a golden age of racist, sexist comedy - was evoked on Thursday's Gay Byrne Show (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday).

Professor Des MacHale of UCC, who is planning a comedy summer school, first complained about Father Ted relying on paddywhackery - and then, without irony, moaned with Gay that "political correctness" is killing comedy by eliminating all the "targets".

MacHale elaborated: "You take away the mothers in law, take away the women, take away the blacks, take away the Irish - what have you got left?"