It sounds like a half-decent Christmas song is about as likely to come along this winter as a half-decent soccer song next summer. Just as next year we'll have to reach back 12 years to Put 'Em Under Pressure, this month I still wait to hear only the even older Fairytale of New York, and a handful of still-more-remote memories.
Fairytale encapsulates what's needed in a Christmas song - what's needed, indeed, in Christmas. It's got to have a sense of memories, somehow magically, momentarily recoverable. It needs to evoke primal, pagan pleasure, love and music. It should acknowledge, even embrace our pitiable mortality. And it must at least suggest some form of transcendence. Yep, Shane MacGowan and Charles Dickens had it all figured out.
Them, and Louis Armstrong. On Thursday's Late Junction (BBC Radio 3, Monday to Thursday), Fiona Talkington played the most amazing Christmas song that doesn't mention Christmas, an Armstrong rendition of the old spiritual, Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen.
Now, no one could be in any doubt about that song meeting the memories and mortality criteria; but as Louis improvises gorgeous, spoken lyrics to talk to Jesus, and improvises gorgeous, soaring trumpet lines to beckon, I imagine, to his lover, all the other ingredients fly brilliantly, heart-make-or-breakingly into place. Any chance of getting it on the 2FM playlist for a couple of weeks?
That seems like an awful lot to deliver in a few minutes of mere sound, but it turns out even a speech-based radio programme can contain multitudes. Signs of Life (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday) is a strange new series of "drama-documentaries" about metaphors relating to illness, and the first one, Nicholas McInerny's The Drowning, was "about" cystic fibrosis (CF). In it, Tim Dinsley, a father who lost three children to CF, recalled his infant daughter, Jo: "If you kissed her, she tasted salty". People called her "dainty" and "petite".
So far, not so strange. This was straightforward documentary material, with ne'er a metaphor to be seen. But wait, this wasn't docu-drama in the traditional sense, but a programme in which documentary and drama ran in parallel. The oft-used description for the effect of CF is of drowning, as the sufferer's lungs fill with mucous. So what The Drowning did was to "montage" every few words between the "documentary", of which Jo's father's account is a part, and the "drama", in which the sole survivor, Jonah, gives his account to an interviewer of the sinking of a ship, the Ophelia. In effect, the documentary fills the pauses in the drama's dialogue.
The result is truly astonishing: "The mucous gets stuck in the tubes", "Of course you feel guilty, it's natural to feel guilty . . . " Or: "A window was open, it was ajar - ", "The physio had to be done four or five times a day . . . " Or, a more "helpful" juxtaposition: "One of the ways youngsters cope with that is they live for the day . . . ", " . . . But I couldn't". Jo's very real, remembered death corresponds with the fictional Jonah's redemption, what he calls his re-birth, but what turns out actually to be his death, too. I think. Oh, dear.
It is quite a trick listening to both "strands" of The Drowning, drama and documentary - it's like channel-surfing between two shows you want to hear - and that's before you start worrying about how they are connected. And you also can't help wondering how Tim Dinsley must feel about hearing his tragic and true story interwoven with an arty, moody bit of drama about a drowning man - an interweaving which at times seems to associate this bereaved father with fictitious Jonah's survivor's guilt.
The Drowning ends with the traditional phone numbers, etc. that usually accompany issue-oriented programmes. But again, you'd have to wonder whether anyone directly affected by CF would be phoning to do anything except give out about this showboating presentation of a truly awful illness. And people like me, not directly affected, were probably too engrossed in trying to compartmentalise the information on offer to absorb it.
None the less, I wouldn't be much of an Irish Times radio critic if I didn't offer at least two cheers for this sort of thing, an adventurous attempt at genre-schtupping and at defamiliarising certain habits of programming and of listening. While I wasn't entirely taken by The Drowning, I think I'll find myself tuning into the remaining programmes in the series.
Michael West's Death of Naturalism, part of the excellent All Talk series (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday), was only in the ha'penny place as regards mucking with our minds, compared with The Drowning. It was also, as it happens, more successful. Here's the set-up: a continuity announcer's voice tells us that the lecture we are about to hear wasn't broadcast in its original slot, as part of a series on contemporary theatre, due to "legal reasons".
For a couple of minutes we wonder why: all we're hearing is a plummy Dublin academic bemoaning the decline of naturalism in drama.
Before long, however, it becomes clear that he has just one particular drama in mind, and he wanders into a denunciation of a play written by his ex-wife, clearly inspired by the break-up of their marriage.
First he goes for some cheap shots at her expense, as he cites the differences between her heroic account of a woman's liberating claim on her own sexuality/destiny and the rather tackier reality of the playwright's real-life failures and betrayals.
However, our narrator can't maintain the outrage, and his memories sink into the living-room where both his wife's play and some of the real drama of their lives has been enacted. It turns into a beautiful, sad meditation on marriage, all the more moving for being so cleverly buried by West under so many postmodern layers of meaning and meta-fiction.
With all this off-beat, fictional/factual and media-wise programming filling the airwaves, I was all set for Thomas Davis Lecture - Radio in Ireland (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday). This purported to be a lecture on the 75th anniversary of Irish radio by a leading RT╔ executive, but it ended up sounding like a transparent apologia for her brilliant career and the even more brilliant schedule she oversees. And all of this self-serving "lecture" was interspersed with the sort of generalities about the social power of radio and its maybe-someday-digital future that you'd expect to read in that half-baked radio review column of Saturday's Irish Times.
That was a parody of Helen Shaw, wasn't it?
hbrowne@irish-times.ie