NO DOUBT about the radio story of the week. A pair of tantrum prone brothers throw a particularly big one, and the computerised playlists are reprogrammed to double up on Wonderwall and Don't Look Back In Anger (wouldn't it be cool to hear a different Oasis song?), while lazy hacks everywhere chortle What's the story?" and "Definitely, maybe".

Fair enough. No one ever said working in the media was going to be hard. But the hype machine inevitably churns out absurdity. Such as Today at Five (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) on Friday covering the story (about which there was no news whatsoever) five minutes into the programme - and giving us a rock expert (I'll spare his blushes) who acknowledged that Oasis are "a great band", but lamented that they would never "achieve infinite greatness" without breaking the US market.

"Infinite greatness"? Is this an oblique reference to the Beatles "bigger than God" row? It sounded more like Dermot Morgan doing his Dunphy imitation on telly last week. (What? That was really Dunphy? Go way...)

Who knows what all this means in the real world of fans, away from the hyberbolic hacks. Some clue, perhaps, came in Ciara Elliott's heartachingly lovely documentary, Meeting the Idol (RTE Radio 1, Thursday), about a young admirer's obsession with Boyzone. (Yes, I know, Boyzone are not a great band. To be rockist about it, they're not even a band, but a mere group.)

Being younger, Emma was more honest than your average Oasis fan about how high up "haircuts" rank in her list of reasons to love the Boyz. In fact, she devotes a section of her diary to their do's. Meeting the Idol spent a lot of time in Emma's sweet diary, in which she admits to mixed feelings about being personally close to her dreamboats: "If I really knew them I'd feel stupid about getting so excited . . ." - and the excitement is the best part.

But such ambivalence can't get in the way of a good documentary and Ciara brought her to meet Boyzone. We heard the lads being nice enough to her, which mostly consisted of asking her if she was all right. From her came the occasional "All right, I'm over it, I'm not gonna cry any more."

The programme drew a poignant contrast between her demeanour and her subsequent, upbeat diary entry, then switched back to her quizzing Ciara in the immediate aftermath of the meeting: "Would they have thought I was really, like, stupid? I couldn't help it, but I was just so happy. He wouldn't have minded, wouldn't he not?"

By the time she phoned the mammy, Emma was tentatively reconstructing the event: "I wasn't like bawling or anything ... I got a nosebleed - it wasn't, like, heavy."

MARTIN Deeson, a journalist with Loaded magazine, didn't say if he got a nosebleed in Mountjoy. This English hack from the yobs' bible found his visit to Dublin for "In the City" diverted northside when he vandalised a hotel, as he told Yum Yum (Anna Livia FM Thursday, repeated Saturday).

Deeson's tale is actually too rarely heard. "Mountjoy is filthy beyond filthy ... nice people, very welcoming - but they're IV drug users, they're spitting on the floor. There were six in our cell; two of us were sleeping on the floor on mattresses. There was the toilet in the corner, with a half door separating it, that doesn't really flush properly. You're locked up for 18 hours a day."

Super cool Yum Yum host Luke Clancy inquired: "So would it be fair to say you didn't do the kind of networking you were expecting to do?"

Deeson laughed a bit nervously, then continued. "I've always thought I understood prisons - how nasty prison is, what a futile, pointless exercise it is. No one's gonna be reformed by it, all it's gonna do is make you more angry, violent, pissed off with society.

"And you get to meet a whole load of other criminals. I've been in there three days and I've learned how to hotwire a car, how to mainline heroin using citric acid ... Some of the kids I was with are 18 years old and they've been in there six months at a time before they even come to trial."

Luke Clancy audibly smirked. "So is there something magic about being a Loaded journalist? A lot of people could go looking for that kind of experience on a weekend in Dublin and just mightn't be lucky enough to find it."

Deeson rode it out. "There was nothing lucky about it at all." Possibly Deeson deserves this sort of treatment and the scathing studio comments made about him after the interview. Or maybe the trippy Yum Yum aesthetic - which is mostly so much fun - should steer clear of this sort of thing.

For an opposite aesthetic, a fascinating Kaleidoscope Special (BBC Radio 4, Friday) visited the Nicaraguan set of Ken Loach's forthcoming film, Carla's Song, set in the midst of the Contra war. The director's emphasis on authenticity was staggering - I can almost hear the po mo Yum Yummers of this world grinning, "Authenticity, Psshaw" - with inexperienced actors immersed in roles and not actually knowing what was going to happen next, during shoots in historically relevant locations. More power to him.