Sometimes it seems Gerry Ryan's great pleasure in hosting a radio show is a touchingly simple, effortlessly adolescent one: it affords him the opportunity to discuss "women's bits" in public without (much) opprobrium.
This week heard the bould Gerry in fine fettle, just back from a holiday in New York that no less an authority than himself described as a virtual Bacchanal of late nights, drinking and dining, all in sweaty 90-degree temperatures. The mind boggled. Then, sure enough, he wasn't long about indulging his little taste for the intimacies of the female form.
The occasion was Tuesday's Gerry Ryan Show (2FM, Monday to Friday) and an interview with Joy Gilbert, a US survivor of the closest conceivable encounter with aliens - and I don't mean Nigerian asylum-seekers. Gilbert's contacts with extra-terrestrials have established beyond her own possibly reasonable doubt that she is herself of E.T. stock, and Gerry would "explore" that, no worry. But first he had some words he wanted to roll around his mouth, in the guise of a question about Gilbert's shipboard probings.
"When women are involved," he lovingly opined, "these examinations would appear often to be of a gynaecological nature." It was pure Gerry genius, in one line reminding listeners that we think he's a perv, while charming us with his obvious self-knowledge; ingratiating himself with the interviewee by affirming her experience, while letting us regulars in on his sneer at her expense; and, not incidentally, demonstrating yet again his off-the-cuff talent for the mot juste - along with his considerable pride in that talent.
Yes, he's the most talented radio presenter in the country, and let's face it, there's no point in wishing he'd use his gift for good rather than evil. In Gerrydom, it's all the one; it would be a sad sort of life that didn't have some time for this sort of crap, and if three hours every weekday morning is actually rather a lot of it, blame the cultural decadence that accompanies the contradictions of advanced capitalism, don't blame Gerry.
I had the good fortune to be on a bus with Gerry's E.T. interview blaring, and silence fell across the passengers as Gerry moved Gilbert smoothly across alien obstetrics, the physics of intergalactic transport and the effects of her experience on her divorce-court proceedings. Then, at the ad break, the bus filled with murmurs about mad Americans, before 50 ears tuned in again. Anyway, if you want radio that's Good as well as good, there's always Olivia O'Leary. On Between Ourselves (BBC Radio 4, Tues- day) she was talking to Pamela and Edmund, two English people with long and troubling experiences of writing to Death-Row prisoners in the US.
O'Leary wasn't simply a facilitator: she asked challenging questions about people's motivations in writing to condemned killers in a far-off land. Nonetheless, vivid stories and interesting opinions were allowed to emerge.
Pamela became a "munter" to one prisoner, Jonathan - that's a mother, aunt and sister combined. She had the perverse privilege, then, of witnessing his execution, where he spoke that strange word through the glass to her before the lethal injection kicked in. The warder was "very discreetly and very seriously and solemnly chewing gum". Jonathan faded away as he sang Silent Night.
Interestingly, we heard it's often not even a state employee, but a hired, self-employed executioner, who sees off the condemned. This is yet another way that Americans evade the grim reality of executions, along with ceaseless media dehumanising of the prisoners.
So why do Americans do this? "They are still frontiersmen," Edmund said. But while the death penalty may sound like a wild-west "quick solution", Edmund went on to cite the irony: "the death penalty takes longer to implement in the US than in any other country".
Sam Smyth is no Olivia O'Leary or Gerry Ryan, but he has certainly put his mark on Sunday Supplement (Today FM, Sunday). The mark is a little too deep at times, because as presenter he's inclined to control the arguments that should be raging more freely around the studio.
Last week he quite mercilessly enforced consensus about the supposed silliness of the anti-capitalist May Day protesters in London. He was bolstered, via telephone, by Boris Johnston of the Spectator, no less, and it was a confident pair of old fogies they made, assuring us that these eejit lefties offer no logical alternative to global capitalism.
When a Radio 4 documentary smugly endorses a particular model for economic development, you can probably safely assume that it has run its course.
The documentary was part one of the three-part Lost Leaders (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday), and it essentially asked why Japan can't be more like Microsoft. (Next week the series will presumably ask similar questions about Russia, before turning in the final programme to some rhapsodies about the US, with a few blue notes about moral decline.)
Back to the startling revelations about Japan: postwar Japan, it seems, has concentrated on economic prosperity rather than political development. What's more, it's a nation of contradictions between tradition and modernity, "a country of mobile phones and geisha girls, of supertankers and sumo wrestlers". Hmmm. Now poor old Japan has a crisis of leadership, doncha know. Here they are in mid-recession, and we heard about one of these mad corporatist employers, actually spending his own savings to pay the workers who have been loyal to the company down through the years.
For Japan to thrive again, it's going to have to get merciless. Or, as one expert put it, "the traditions of stability and security now mean stagnation . . ."
Japan needs "a decisive and wise leader . . . In a country of 125 million educated people, it shouldn't be difficult to encounter such a man [sic]". But sadly, shockingly, the Japanese education system rewards conformity. "Overall, the Japanese prefer harmony to strong leadership."
In the midst of the nonsense, there was at least acknowledgment that the political system in Japan has been hugely corrupt, leading to "cynicism". Here's a question relevant to our Tiger Island: is it "cynicism" about politics to have an accurate picture of it as a corrupt profession?
At any rate, "forward-thinking" (i.e. right-wing) Japanese are looking to 1980s Britain for guidance. One of them explained: "We tend to think of Britain as a nation of gentlemen, when it's actually a nation of pirates." Britain through Thatcher rediscovered its "buccaneering past" - but where is the Japanese leader who will do that?
Pirates? Frontiersmen? A nation of shopkeepers starts to sound good.
Harry Browne is contactable at hbrowne@irish-times.ie