No harm to Alan Shortt and his Saturday-morning team at RTE Radio 1. They're making an effort at political satire and have got Pee Flynn in their sights; it's just that, for now, they're not quite funny. It was noteworthy this weekend that scarcely had their show ended - complete with its Flynnstoneslike exchanges between "Senor Pee" and his new housekeeper, Consuela - than Emer Woodfull was introducing Soundbyte with a sort of lament for Dermot Morgan.
Poor Pee, it seems, having for years bestrode the Eurostage like a colossus, has now slipped back into the backwoods of Morgan's imaginings. (I'd imagine it's a lot easier to con the Brussels press corps than the voters of Mayo, but never mind.) Terry Prone, who occasionally coaches Flynn, lamented the old stereotype for Soundbyte; Woodfull blamed Flynn for living down to it. Neither of them said the obvious: Flynn sounds like Morgan because Morgan had him dead to rights - his Pee was never stupid, just unshakeably arrogant. Still, Soundbyte with Woodfull is very promising. The most subtle interrogator of media practice around, Woodfull posed fascinating questions about PR, politics and the tribunals to a trio of practitioners. Pat Heneghan - in spite of his insistence on using "task" and "impact" as verbs - was sharp: lucky Prone, he said, to have a client like Flynn who lets her keep missing his controversial TV performances.
Woodfull coaxed Heneghan to explain his job doing PR for Bovale at the Flood tribunal. Did a barrister's outburst about "a waste of taxpayers' money" happen just in time for the lunchtime news at Heneghan's suggestion? No, Heneghan said; but it sounded far from beyond him . .
There's very little that will shift the conviction in parishes such as The Irish Times that Saturday's victory for Ulster in rugby union's European Cup represented a seismic moment of national unity, post-nationalist variety. Fine. I just can't quite shake the cringe-inducing sound, from a few weeks back, of Keith Gillepsie - soccer player for Blackburn Rovers and a Protestant boy from Belfast - offering the oral equivalent of a blank stare to the BBC Radio 5 Live interviewer who broke him the news that his native province had reached the final. The Englishman was thrilled; the Ulsterman couldn't so much as squeeze out "that's nice".
No doubt by Saturday the likes of Gillespie had been caught up in the hype. Still, RTE Radio 1 was not taking any chances, and continued to sprinkle generous helpings of Premiership soccer through its coverage of the all-Ireland party at Lansdowne Road.
Not before, however, commentator Jim Glennon provided a wouldbe-emotional summation of pure hilarity: "The GPO in 1916!" You what, Jim? "Thomond Park in 1978!" Yeah, okay. "And now Lansdowne Road today! In years to come a quarter-million people will try to say they were here on the day Ulster won the European Cup." With you now, Jim. But apart from the understandable parochialism of a rugby man who insists that there are 250,000 people in Ireland who give a damn, perhaps you might have found a more - you know - reconciliatory reference point than the Easter Rising. "The Somme in 1916!" perhaps?
Never let it be said that RTE doesn't know how to mark a moment of history. The tape of that moment, when Ulster won a great sporting victory and the national broadcaster compared it to the Fenians stabbing the Empire in the back, could be a bestseller up around Portadown . . .
Public service and local commercial radio don't always walk handin-hand. We haven't (yet) had a station sink to the - clever - depths of the Birmingham broadcaster which arranged last week's "Blind Wedding". (As someone said, if they're both stupid enough to have their marriage, to someone they've never met, arranged by a radio station, they may actually be very well suited.) But there's no shortage of cynical rubbish here.
So we owe a huge "fair play" to Tipp FM and its MD, John O'Connell. That Tipperary station is engaged in a pilot project of importance and direct service to its listeners. With some money from the IRTC - and with considerable funding from its own coffers - Tipp FM has teamed up with the National Adult Literacy Agency. NALA supplies the programming and workbooks, and Tipp FM has secured two special, dedicated frequencies in Nenagh and Clonmel for a two-hour broadcast every evening, Monday to Friday. Some 80 people in or adjacent to those towns have signed up. Indeed, such has been the interest throughout the county - and such is the need - that on Saturday and Sunday evenings Tipp FM has decided to play the programmes again, this time on its normal commercial frequencies. That's scarcely radio primetime, but in a competitive business it's an admirably risky move.
The scope for such direct services will be immense when digital radio arrives. Satellite systems also offer possibilities for beating the current frequency jam-up and using the medium educationally. But Tipp FM isn't waiting around; one hopes many listeners will have reason to be grateful.
