Some time ago a radio executive told your previously intrepid columnist: "When you guys knock us, we know we're on the right track." It wasn't so much a formula, more a recurring happy coincidence - bad reviews are almost invariably followed by rising listenership ratings.
Of course there are, just possibly, exceptions. Eamon Dunphy recently told a conference that radio reviewers had prevented The Last Word from slipping into the Today FM memory hole. If there's a badge going for that mission, I suppose I'll wear it with pride - but dubiously, it must be said. I scarcely think this column is likely to win anyone a mass audience, though it might at a push and on a rare occasion buy time for someone like Dunphy from station executives.
Anyway, if the inverse relationship between critical and audience approval is a credible hypothesis in general, it must have unassailable status when it comes to something like the new sound of 2FM. Critics are almost invariably snooty about pop music, which by definition is what most people want to listen to.
And then there's the more particular small matter of how someone in (early) middle age - whose CD stack is dominated by black tunes from the 1950s to the 1970s - is going to respond to a station that has reconfigured its programming to appeal to teens and young adults, with a musical cut-off date of 1979, God help us. (Hey, wait, I remember that great song from after 1979 . . .)
So, good news for 2FM: I've been listening to Damien McCaul's Breakfast Show (2FM, Monday to Friday) and I think it's awful.
Yes, while I'd barred myself from Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), it was all I could do to avoid switching over to Ian Dempsey (Today FM, Monday to Friday). It set me yearning for the erstwhile wit and wisdom of Gareth O'Callaghan. I thought the music was boring and the speech was death warmed over. Watch the ratings soar.
McCaul is one of the bright young things in Montrose, a children's TV presenter turned would-be radio star. His breakfast programme bears certain similarities to Den TV - the big competition is for primary-school students (so much for the famous 20to-35s) to write a rap song. But I'll tell you, it could badly do with the likes of Dustin.
Instead, the emphasis is on the music. And this being the low-ad world of RTE, the beat does go on, no doubt about it. It's just as well, because the programme stops dead when Damien (Omen 2000?) opens his mouth. Now, I generally feel about Des Cahill roughly the way Cahill feels about Man United, but this week I really felt sorry for Cahill trying to squeeze an exchange about sport out of McCaul (blood and stone come to mind).
On Thursday, McCaul half-heartedly forked up a question about Liverpool's Champion's League prospects, then before Dessie could answer it, McCaul said he'd had a few concerned queries about his sports knowledge, or lack thereof. Cahill, astonishingly, chimed in that he'd also had some emails wondering "hey, what's the story?" with McCaul. Charitably, however, Cahill said he could hardly expect McCaul to get up to speed in a month or two.
And that was it: no humour, no ribbing, no fun. They barely even managed the obligatory chuckling tone, which is just as well when the content was so eminently chuckleless.
If McCaul has an opposite around the radio centre, it might be the venerable Donncha O Dulaing, for whom intimacy need never be forced and familiarity is the vehicle that takes him right around Ireland.
His bank holiday documentary putt-putted nicely along. Birth of the Beetle (RTE Radio 1, Monday) was about Volkswagen in Ireland, and was a little loose around the edges, but no better man: it gorgeously conjured up the extraordinary relationship of this country and that car, with history, with anecdotes, with affection.
Donncha doesn't overburden himself with scripting his links: he came in after a tape of Maxi reminiscing about her beloved VW, "Sunny", with a bizarre "Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts . . . from Maxi" when this definitely overdignfied her comments.
Nonetheless, the programme had some fine bits of craft: a piece of doggerel poetry about the first VW importer in Ireland gave way to a blast of Wagner. And shrewdly included was our own motoring correspondent, Andrew Hamilton, dwelling on the irony of the Beetle: a conception of the century's most unpopular man became the century's most popular car.
Danny Morrisson has proven something of a radio personality of late, commenting intelligently on politics and reading from his own writings - last autumn on Lyric FM, and this week on the Book on One (RTE Radio, Tuesday to Friday). But much the most extraordinary thing about this most recent outing is the accompanying press release from RTE: Morrison is described as a "former political prisoner" and "a great writer" shining his light "into the deepest and darkest recesses of the human soul".
Can it really be only six years since his voice, like those of his republican comrades, was banned from the airwaves?
His epistolary prison memoirs, Then the Walls Came Down, are the subject of The Book on One. He reads them well, even if they are a little hard to follow, because there are no breaks to indicate the passage of time. And sometimes we get amusing pieces of what sounds like Sinn Fein rhetoric out of context: "There's no point now getting into a definitive position" isn't a political evasion, but a warning to his partner against attaching herself to him when he faces years in jail.
And there are startling visions: the H-Blocks are "huge and bright blue and filled with fresh air" after the months on remand in Crumlin Road.
Along the way, there is the sense of endurance and dread, as a group of accused drag their way through a long trial: "All of us have dried, there's no chit-chat and we're fed up eating sweets . . . no wonder people plead guilty."
I don't know about a great writer, but this was good radio.