Balanced on the Rock

RadioReview:Northern Rock customers gnawing their fingers to the knuckle might not have appreciated the bouncy musical intro to the coverage of that bank's sorry story on The Business (RTÉ R1, Sunday), but for me, a blast of the corny old disco hit, Solid as a Rock, provided just enough encouragement to stay listening.

Business coverage can take itself very seriously and the Sunday morning scheduling for this specialist business programme demands a mix that will appeal to general listeners without coming over too lightweight for business boffins. It's a fine balance, but one that The Business seems to have cracked. After Ashford and Simpson had sung their worst, there was a solid, well-informed discussion - and an easy-to-understand, jargon-free explanation as to how the bank got into such a mess. So all the bases were covered. Then there was a whistlestop tour through a new finance company in Midleton, Co Cork, and an item about 1800 Hotel, a Dublin-based hotel reservation company.

David Hall, a business development guru, was the programme's star turn and he talked to presenter John Murray about the many challenges facing small businesses. One of the things he said was that energy and malleability are more important than paper qualifications when recruiting staff. Not exactly rocket science but still interesting stuff, especially with the presenter's easy-going style of interview.

For all Hall's inspirational line of get-up-and-go advice, it'd be difficult to see him getting as far as Pom Boyd did with her group of charges. She's a drama facilitator with Rade, an inner-city Dublin scheme which aims to help addicts express themselves through art, and hopefully progress to a drug-free life. It's a desperately tough job, as Ronan Kelly's challenging Documentary on One (RTÉ R1, Wednesday) showed. His programme followed the 16-strong group over several months as they prepared to devise, rehearse and then perform a play in front of President Mary McAleese.

"All the broken people fixing themselves in front of the President," said Kelly, who balances empathy on a personal level with a pragmatic questioning of the value of such courses. Why not teach these people computer skills or how to answer a phone, more job-related skills, he asked, and the answer came in a roundabout way from the course participants, who are self-aware enough to know just how far from entering the mainstream they really are.

"Me life'd done a 180 turn; hopefully it'll be 360 if I'm still here next year," said one woman, bursting with enthusiasm in the early days of rehearsals, who, as time went on, became so disruptive she was asked to leave. Boyd explained that her cast are nearly all on methadone, and rehearsals can be chaotic - the snippets we heard were full of petty squabbling which threatened to spill over into something more serious if not for Boyd's expert interventions. Unusually for a theatre director, she was never entirely sure who was going to fetch up on performance night - the carrot for people on the scheme is that they get paid if they attend, lose out if they don't, but sometimes that's not enough of an incentive. The programme showed how those who did complete the course and went on to perform their self-devised play in the Project Arts Centre got more from the experiment then they would from any amount of theoretically more sensible word-processing courses.

Both David Norris and Eamon Dunphy are settled back into new runs of their nearly identical (in terms of format) weekend interview programmes, Sunday With Norris (Newstalk) and Conversations With Eamon Dunphy (RTÉ R1, Saturday) and there is little sign so far that either show is making any major effort to avoid the usual suspects. Finding new voices on this small island is a challenge for any radio producer, though starting the new series with Pat Rabbitte and then following last week with Liam Clancy doesn't suggest that Dunphy's production team is trying too hard. Norris did a bit better, chatting to Louis Mulcahy, the Dingle-based potter who I have never heard being interviewed before. It was also a chance to give exposure to an art form that gets little attention. The mystery and fascination in pottery, Mulcahy said, is "the apparent alchemy of clay on a wheel", though there's bad news for anyone embarking on that perennial favourite, the evening pottery class. It takes, according to Mulcahy "seven years to do it well and at speed".