What a pity for Gaybo. As commiserations poured into the Montrose radio centre on Friday, the great man seemed more than a little tetchy about the attention being paid to his unconsummated relationship with Meryl Streep.
"It started out as a gag, you know," Byrne insisted, quite truthfully I'm sure. But as he carried on with the gag and sobbed for "my Meryl", you couldn't help but feel that a lovely opportunity for closure was being missed. (Not without a fight, it appears: Gay told us that the "radio car" was lurking somewhere the far side of Navan to intercept the Streepmobile en route from Donegal to Dublin Airport and snag the star for a chat - all for nought in the end.)
While Eamon Dunphy (Eamon Dunphy!) got an "exclusive" interview with Meryl on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday), Gay was left with his regrets. Part of the silly appeal of the Meryl gag was, when it started a decade or so ago, the woman's unattainability, the vast and unbridgable distance between an Irish broadcasting personality - even the Irish broadcasting personality - and the world's biggest movie actress.
Last week's opportunity to bridge that gap was to some extent a sign that Streep has slipped a bit, but it's also emblematic of Ireland's relocation in the entertainment world, from the days when we flocked to see The Courier to today's "oh, no, not another Irish movie".
Sure, the Late Late has hosted some pretty big stars down all those years, but it's only in recent times that there's a Tigerish mood suggesting these Hollywood types are hanging around town, always ready to drop in.
Whether Uncle Gaybo has grown with us or we've grown out of him is beside the point. It would have been one of the markers of the change that, in this, his closing season, he turned the running joke into a casual chat with his Meryl.
Pitched directly against Gay's quest for Meryl on one local radio station last Friday (and repeated on Sunday), was an anniversary documentary on one of Irish politics' most distinctive figures, a man with a cultural bent whose scepticism about the Tiger's arrogance was well known: Jim Kemmy. Big Jim: A Limerick Life (95 FM Limerick) contained no trace of the man's own unmistakable (sometimes indecipherable) voice - except in as much as it is echoed in the tones of his brother. Instead, we heard sometimes conflicting accounts of his battle-strewn history from journalists and politicians who themselves carry the scars.
Kemmy being Kemmy, and this being Limerick, the material was hardly uncontroversial; Limerick Leader editor Brendan Halligan, for example, was forced to defend the paper's stance and treatment of Kemmy on issues such as abortion. Not surprisingly, I suppose, the programme was insistently local. Thus in Limerick, where Kemmy was involved in setting up the first family-planning clinic, the "moral issues" of the 1970s and 1980s took centre stage. No mention at all was made of what from Dublin looked like the most unique aspect of Kemmy's politics: his passionate opposition not only to the IRA but to Irish nationalism in general. With all the time devoted to moral crusades and constituency rows, some of the other history seemed a bit thin. We heard little more than the familiar story of Kemmy's political self-tutoring during his years as a young man in England; and while Des O'Malley chucklingly described Kemmy's 1960s politics as "extreme", all we heard was that Kemmy condemned the infamous anti-semitic "pogrom" of 1904 and opposed the Springboks' rugby tour. Oh yes, plus O'Malley's vaguely recalled 1960s cliche about some march where somebody was waving Mao's Little Red Book. Extreme? Case unproven, unfortunately.
What's certain is the warmth with which the man is remembered, and his remarkable, selfless devotion to unprofitable, unpopular pursuits such as his scholarship on local history, women's poetry and the like. This peripherally political element of his personality came through sweetly in the documentary, which made it a worthwhile tribute.
The comments in last week's column about The Pete Seeger Story (RTE Radio 1, Monday), while complimentary, underestimated the cleverness of the series's presenter and producer, Colm Keane. While the first two programmes did indeed include only relatively subdued studio recordings from the folk singer, Keane saved the robust singalongs for last night's final programme, chronicling the folkrevival years of the 1960s. While Seeger himself stressed his doubts about the depth of the revival - seeing the machinations of next-big-thing record executives at work - there's no doubt that the situation marked a considerable improvement on the 1950s, when Seeger's manager told him to drop If I Had a Hammer from the repertoire, to "try to keep those blacklisters off our backs".
Anyway, Keane closed the show fittingly, with Seeger's voice disappearing among the hundreds of others singing a final chorus of We Shall Overcome. No doubt the memories were fit to burst many a listener's heart.
