It can't be often David Hanly gets to interview someone who sounds more patrician than he does himself. But there he was, on yesterday's Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), chatting with Gore Vidal, America's answer to, well, Europe. Vidal also readily displays an arrogance and self-regard to which our David couldn't begin to aspire. Vidal comes from a class where all names are employed in the glorification of one's lineage: when I was in college I knew a guy whose first name was Whitney but who was related, as it were, to the New York museum of that moniker; yesterday, Vidal revealed to Hanly that Al Gore is his Tennessee cousin. (I wonder is he also related to Vidal Sassoon?)

With great relish Vidal shared his opinion of how his vice-presidential cousin's moral qualities stack up against Bill Clinton's: "Al is squeaky clean. He has never lusted in his heart for anyone, and [pause and enunciate for full effect] no one has ever lusted for him."

For all his amusing qualities, Vidal is a genuine American patriot and dissident who generally has interesting things to say about how his country is projecting itself in the wider world. For what it's worth, he suggested that the current US foreign-policy adventures has led to a situation he had never previously seen in 50 years of living and travelling in Italy: ordinary Italians - "the most genial of people" - now "despise" Americans.

Vidal has the sense and grace not to blame this state of affairs on the Italians. The same compliment doesn't apply to the American journalist - David McGuffin, his name sounded like, though that's too good to be true - who reported from Russia for World Report (RTE Radio 1, Saturday).

Poor McGuffin, it seems, couldn't get any of these bad-tempered Russians to so much as sit beside him on the bus when they saw his reading an English-language book. That old Slavic brotherhood, about which we've heard so much, has a lot to answer for.

Then there's the Russian media, which, McGuffin told us, has shamefully focused on images of Belgrade burning and gone missing on the refugee crisis. That bias was challenged only on one television station, "an independent outlet in a country where most of the media is controlled by [wait for it] wealthy oligarchs".

Perhaps working for the US network National Public Radio - an apparently oligarch-free zone - has given McGuffin the luxury of missing a few pertinent facts about the control of "independent" media in the west. At any rate, it seems a bit hard on Russian journalists, now that they're no longer "doing the bidding of their communist masters", to complain about them doing the bidding of their capitalist bosses.

The transformation of Van Morrison into bizarre, highly posed gossip-page fodder for certain sections of our "independent" media - together with his purveying of inferior tracks such as Precious Time - is one of the more depressing elements of the cultural environment.

All the more so when you realise how unusual it is, outside of John Kelly's Mystery Train (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) and Donal Dineen's Here Comes the Night (Today FM, Sunday to Thursday, and named in tribute to The Man), to hear songs recorded by Morrison in his 1960s and 1970s prime. The most influential works by any Irish artist of this era, starting with the incredible Astral Weeks, doubtless receive far more airplay in other countries than they do in Ireland.

Some reparation was done in Giant at My Shoulder (RTE Radio 1, Friday), when Belfast poet Gerald Dawe conjured up quite beautifully the concerns and passions of that era and of that music. It was lovely to be reminded that he and his band, Them, could inspire people with something that is legitimately labelled "independence":

"What Van stood for - stands for", Dawe's corrected himself politely, "is a kind of independence . . It wasn't as if he was trying to savour, garnish some sense of being a pop star. That just wasn't there at all. This was something he could do, he was brilliant at it, he'd get on stage, doing the stuff with the band and then go. In a way he was kind of like an antihero.

"It was the kind of confidence that Them gave that made myself and a couple of my friends start to write . . ."

Harry Browne's Radio Column transfers to the Weekend section from next Saturday, April 17th.