Probably it's in the nature of the Irish Times readership - and of the audience for this page in particular - that such feedback as this column attracts does tend to the one point of view.
The complaint being: this newspaper's radio reviewer should really pay more attention to the more sophisticated end of British broadcasting, and write more often about radio drama and the like.
It's a perfectly valid opinion. (And one the fates conspire to sustain: just a fortnight ago, several enthusiastic paragraphs about a brilliant, unorthodox production of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones on BBC Radio 3 were cut, for space reasons, from most editions of the paper. It's true, I swear.)
However, in the years I've been churning out this column no one has given out, in my hearing, about its quite shameful neglect of a radio sector that's far more popular here and - you could certainly argue - more culturally significant: Dublin's late-night phone-ins.
To gauge the seriousness of this realm for programmers you need only recall that the capital's two commercial stations, 98FM and FM104, were willing recently to engage in an ugly public spat over the services of the man regarded as the star of night-talk, Ciaran Gaffney, aka Chris Barry.
And such was the potency of the Barry brand-name that FM104 continued to use it to label its programme for months after the broadcaster walked out. That particular drama still has an episode or two to play, but at the moment it doesn't look like a tragedy for the station Barry left. The FM104 Phone Show with Adrian Kennedy (Sunday to Thursday) has a "new" host with whom much of working-class Dublin is already on first-name terms - as in: "Did you hear Adrian last night?"
What's he talking about? Well, those who decry the hysteria on the subject may not like it, but clearly the winner by a mile is crime. And Kennedy is as provocative, as brash, as vulgar, as spitfire on the subject as his predecessor. At one stage last week, deep in an argument about whether a live feature on the programme about joyriding in Finglas had been an exploitative set-up, Kennedy took a pot shot at the competition - "Well if you wanna hear boring interviews with the Wolfe Tones, then listen to 98FM . . ."
Sorry, Adrian, but at that moment 98FM's Talkback phone-in was also about crime - specifically, the nine-year sentenced meted out to a Dublin handbag-snatcher. As is usually the case, the emerging lowest-common-denominator was that prison is too good for criminals, but one caller wasn't having it and thought the nature of the victim had affected the judgment: "If that stupid bitch hadn't been a tourist, she never woulda got nine years . . ."
Talk radio as practised in the States, or by James Whale in Britain, would rarely entertain such a profane caller; vulgarity and rudeness there are generally the preserve of the host as he cuts off offending phoners. On the Dublin programmes, however, no one is too ignorant to be kept on, as a straw man if nothing else.
Take Dave, the articulate fella who called FM104 last week to explain why he wouldn't support England in football. "I hate de English. I hate dem all. Dey're all bleedin' scumbugs."
Which prompted the favourite phone-in reply from another caller: "That fella is talkin' the greatest load of bollix . . . He's the scumbug."
Dave's pride was hurt. "You're a scumbug. Ya shitebag." Then he added, with an audible grin and quite redundantly, "Up the 'RA." Ten minutes later, Dave was still on the line and the host - Jeremy Dixon, in the wee hours - was still bleating: "Dave, you haven't given us one logical reason why you dislike the English."
(Amusingly, 98FM took up the "Why don't the Irish support England?" argument the very next night - and shattered the impressive FM104 record by taking more than half-an-hour for the word "history" to be mentioned, derisively of course.)
It's very, very, very easy to be dismissive of the intellectual content of these conversations. Kennedy himself rejects the notion that "expertise" - about, say, the causes of crime - has any place on his programme. But when a young joyrider tells his reporter: "Me mother's dead, at the moment, and me father has a drink problem . . ." this cries out for some digestion more profound than: "Cop yerself on", or "Flog 'em".
These programmes clearly have agenda-setting influence. Last Wednesday Kennedy's programme chose to spend an hour discussing a petty crime committed by an Algerian asylum-seeker: should such people who commit crimes be sent back to their countries?
You can guess what the lowest-common-denominator thought; by the end of the hour it sounded like we were under siege from migrant criminals (with no "cop-on", of course). And while Kennedy never said anything overtly racist about migrants - and indeed repeatedly referred to the dangers inherent in sending someone back to Algeria - the conversation strayed dazzlingly far from reality about the workings of the law and of the asylum process. What on earth does this serve, except to stir up hate?
