Radio: Newstalk big beasts Ivan Yates and Pat Kenny stay on the ball, but Joe Duffy takes his eye off it

Some of Newstalk's big-name presenters have been talking an awful lot of balls. It's not that Ivan Yates and Pat Kenny have started spouting opinionated rubbish (or any more than usual, depending on your point of view) but that there's a spike in discussion of the area of male anatomy that the late Ireland rugby coach Mick Doyle referred to as the "testimonials".

Mercifully, most of these conversations relate to health matters, although listeners (and readers) of a delicate disposition may still find their sensibilities bruised.

"We've had a dog licking his testicles; we'll have people feeling their testicles," says Yates, introducing the topic of testicular cancer on Breakfast (Newstalk, weekdays) while also referring to an item dealing with that singular canine habit. If this doesn't wake up a bleary morning audience, nothing will.

The discussion about cancer, with his regular guest Dr Sinead Beirne, is informative, if at times graphic. Stressing the need for men to examine themselves regularly for testicular lumps, Beirne talks about using wet hands to squeeze the soft and smooth skin; it all gets a bit gamey after a while. She also brings in walnuts for the presenters to practise with, prompting Yates's fellow anchor, Chris Donoghue, to remark that his own testes are smaller. "That's very honest of you," says a bemused Beirne. "Did you bring in a nutcracker?" quips Yates.

Such tittering could undermine the gravity of the subject, but Beirne brings sensitivity and seriousness to proceedings. The doctor, who also talks about prostate and breast cancer, highlights men’s reluctance to seek medical help. She tells a particularly poignant story about a patient whose teenage son had died of testicular cancer, having failed to get it checked out until it was too late.

It’s notable that the interview is largely handled by Donoghue. That he overcame cancer some years ago means he knows the territory, but as a host he is more alert than his cohost to the changing contours of a conversation.

Yates can use his personal experience to stirring effect: having been declared bankrupt in Wales, in 2012, he passionately berates the Government for not reducing the Irish term of bankruptcy to a year. But he always seems determined to prove that he has, as the Spanish would say, big cojones. As he shoots the breeze with Pat Kenny about the latter’s upcoming item on testosterone deficiency, Yates contends that his hair loss is down to high levels of the hormone. “Macho man, Ivan the Terrible,” Kenny chuckles in response, effortlessly reasserting his own status as the big beast with a benignly indulgent swipe.

The host's own discussion of gonad-related topics, on The Pat Kenny Show (Newstalk, weekdays), is typically more forensic, as he quizzes a urologist, Ted McDermott, about low hormone syndrome. But he cannot help throwing out awkwardly phrased sexual references that vainly try to be throwaway zingers.

He inquires whether there is such a thing as “BDS”, before gleefully explaining that it’s his polite name for “brewer’s droop syndrome”. On discovering that there’s nothing unusual about men waking in a state of arousal, he delightedly cracks, “So morning glory is normal.” By the time he hears that vasectomies should have no effect on sex drive he muses, “Well, they say sex is all in the mind.”

Although Kenny aims for the naughty informality of the 19th hole, if not the dressing room, his asides have all the spontaneity of a headmaster trying to emulate his pupils’ slang.

But there's something endearing, even comforting, about his dogged efforts to loosen up. And Kenny's clunky humour underlines the purposefulness he brings to heavyweight topics, used to good effect in his interview with Mary Lou McDonald of Sinn Féin and his discussion with my Irish Times colleague Paddy Agnew about the migration crisis in the Mediterranean.

The dreadful events off the Libyan coast did not bring out the best in everyone, as evidenced on Tuesday's edition of Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays). Joe Duffy was talking to the anti-immigration campaigner Áine Ní Chonaill, who if nothing else provides a bracing rebuff to our fond self-image as an instinctively charitable nation.

In truth Ní Chonaill’s attitude to the suffering of the desperate voyagers in the Mediterranean is breathtaking. Unfortunate though the migrants’ situation may be, it is “irrelevant” to her: she doesn’t want to “sacrifice” her country and continent by letting them in. When the community worker Mick Rafferty suggests that “compassion knows no boundaries”, Ní Chonaill counters with a succinct “bullshit” before telling him to “stick your metaphors where the sun don’t shine”.

Nauseating as Ní Chonaill’s contributions may be, one also wonders about Duffy’s decision to open a debate on immigration in such provocative (and ultimately unrepresentative) fashion. The discussion may raise the rhetorical temperature, but it’s also soul-sapping. In the end it’s the radio equivalent of trolling. After that it’s a relief to hear people talking bollocks.

Moment of the Weel: Mauled by Marian
During her Sunday-newspaper panel Marian Finucane (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday and Sunday) discusses the Oireachtas banking inquiry with Ciarán Mac an Bhaird of Dublin City University, who lists the bankers due to testify about the catastrophic financial crisis of 2008: "Dermot Gleeson, Eugene Sheehy, Brian Goggin, Richie Boucher, Conor McCarthy . . ." The host then cuts across him. "Did you notice all the women in there? I had to get out a stronger pair of glasses to see if I could find any," Finucane says in her wryest manner. It's a tart but telling aside, a reminder that the erstwhile presenter of the pioneering 1970s radio show Women Today is well capable of nailing a target. Maybe she should shift her sights towards RTÉ's radio schedule, which is hardly a bastion of gender equality.

radioreview@irishtimes.com