RADIO REVIEW: Darn that Louis Walsh, he's a clever one. There he goes, exposing himself in all his dripping, corrosive cynicism on Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), but he waits until after the deadline for last week's column to do so. But Louis doesn't escape the wrath of this critic that easy: on the basis of the terrible daily damage his acts inflict on radio listeners everywhere, I reckon he's fair game any old week.
Mind you, he's already met his match in Ronan Collins, who carved Louis up on Liveline, in the process enhancing his own reputation - from Ronan Collins, Thoroughly Likeable Old Pro to Ronan Collins, National Treasure (Subject to Six-Month Review). Collins called Walsh on his nasty, charmless devotion to the bottom line, and caught him expressing ownership of his young musical charges in a manner that would have embarrassed Scarlett O'Hara's daddy back on the old plantation.
Let's be fair to Louis, however. In all the years that he was getting a far softer ride from the media, churning out acts as least as puke-inducing as 6, I heard him on the radio umpteen times, and never once heard Walsh say: "it's all about the music, y'know?". Or: "I'm trying to give young people a chance to express themselves artistically."
Uh-uh, nope, the business of Louis Walsh is and always has been business, and success in his business is measured strictly in cash and chart places. If he's falling slightly from grace now, it's not because we've been granted a new revelation - Popstars itself is very coy about this basic business cynicism, actually, compared with Louis's average frank on-air chat with, say, Eamon Dunphy - but because, just maybe, the accretion of dross combined with economic harder times leaves us more easily disgusted with unadulterated greed.
Okay, maybe Popstars has helped him across that line, into the realm of opprobrium. Is it exploitative? Obviously it is, by definition: hundreds of kids work their butts off, most of them without pay, and RTÉ, a TV production company, Louis and BMG cream the profits. But haven't these kids consented to being exploited? Maybe. But Louis dangles a very, very big carrot - fame, fortune, and everything that goes with it, as Freddie Mercury used to "sing" - that effectively hides the stick - public exposure and humiliation. It's as though every time you played Lotto you consented to letting a TV crew into your home to watch your family interact and check out the wallpaper and sitting-room suite.
But hey, as the producer of Popstars told Marian Finucane (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) a couple of weeks ago, these ought to be adults, "old enough to take the knocks". Which would be a point, except that the producers didn't care enough to ensure that contestants were 18, and surely exposed other minors besides dear Nadine to their prying cameras. Even when they knew Nadine was 16, not old enough to take the knocks, they kept filming her. Anyway, the show has made children - nay, infants - of all its participants, emphasising their giggles and pouts, their teddy bears, their mammies and daddies, their wet-nurse, Linda Martin. Yuck. Well done, Ronan.
Colm Hayes is in some ways Dublin-station FM104's answer to Ronan Collins as much as to Dave Fanning, with his vast and audible radio experience - none of your makey-up verbal stumbling for Colm and Ronan, they know what they're saying and say it right.¨ Both men are also quite funny and quick-witted, able to turn an accent on like a tap. All the same, despite these other strengths, it was great to see Hayes being honoured last week by Hot Press for the touch-of-Fanning he brings to the Strawberry Alarm Clock (FM104, Monday to Friday) - live, unplugged studio sessions featuring new and notable acts. They are a great addition to a programme that, though it's not my idea of fun (that, I'm afraid, would be Morning Ireland), clearly doesn't need to do such good works to attract other listeners to its usual formula. Fair play to Colm.
TONIGHT with Vincent Browne (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Thursday) had a bit of a seisiún of its own on Tuesday evening, live from Kennedy's pub in Dublin's Westland Row. Tribunal vocal stars Joe Taylor, Malcolm Douglas and the rest of the cast of the live show that's arisen so bizarrely from those nightly re-enactments were on hand to give us a sample of the amusing mix of verbatim testimony and political satire that they're taking to the Project for Saturdays later this month. (Dick Roche even suggested they might get a booking for the Fianna Fáil ardfheis.)
Joe Taylor was an amusing interviewee, too. Who were the hardest voices to do, Vincent asked. "The Norwegians," Taylor replied. "I thought they were going to be yellow-pack Norwegians, but they were all different!" Taylor has been attending tribunals for something like five years, God help him. He talked about the family atmosphere among the regular attendees (detainees?), including journalists, but I wasn't convinced . . . "It's like community service," Taylor said. "If I'd been Liam Lawlor, I'd be out by now."
AS IT happened, it was the same Liam who unwittingly ensured that this Vincent Browne cabaret was something of an anti-climax, a send-up that just couldn't match the real thing. The large numbers of Browne listeners who also tune in Prime Time on the telly would already have seen Lawlor - who now, as a politician, is apparently undefamable - when his photograph filled the screen with poll results beside him reading "CORRUPT 67%" - in full, almost-inimitable flow. Taylor just couldn't match up.
Lawlor is wild, but in turn no match, despite superficial resemblances, to the grey seals breeding on the Blasket Islands off Dingle peninsula, Co Kerry. The Grey Seal, a lovely and loving documentary to be broadcast tonight (RTÉ Radio 1), sees seal-saviour Terry Flanagan take up the microphone and crawl on his belly across tiny Beginish, where seals fruitfully multiply, and we "watch" with him close-up as seal mothers nurse their tiny pups. "I'm half-afraid to look in case I disturb them . . ." This highly competent and informative wildlife documentary is sometimes beautiful listening - if just a bit wordy - and makes the perfect escape from the manky old world of Liam and Louis.
And of Tony Blair. It was during the news break on Thursday's Strawberry Alarm Clock that we heard the heartening news: Britain, Tony told Hamid Karzai in London, has no intention of walking away from Afghanistan. Nope, it is going to continue to provide - wait for it - military assistance to the new regime. When you think about it, war has been such a vital industry for Afghanistan over the last 23 years, and it would be criminal for the West to withdraw its crucial war-making support at this crucial time.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie