RadioReview: It's got nothing to do with his age. In a recent interview, grey-haired Marty Whelan said he once shared a classroom with the ostentatiously black-haired Gerry Ryan - RTÉ 2fm's biggest audience puller, so they must be about the same age.
In any case, with his new Marty in the Morning breakfast show (RTÉ 2fm, Mon-Fri) he is replacing a pair of (relative) whippersnappers, Rick O'Shea and Ruth Scott. They were presented as bright young things when they took over from Ryan Tubridy five months ago but when they were shunted out of the prime slot last Friday, they were producing a breakfast show that was resolutely beige.
Making sense of Marty's new breakfast show has more to do with trying to figure out what RTÉ 2fm, the national broadcaster's music station aimed at 15-35-year-olds, is doing setting the tone for its day with a presenter who spent years on the pastel sofa of afternoon TV, presenting the Rose of Tralee and jollying along scratch card winners for the National Lottery. As safe pairs of hands go, they don't get much safer than Marty.
He should have his own radio show - he's too experienced and downright likeable to be off the air - and although it's years since he made his radio debut, happily he's not stuck in the same poptastic deejaaay world of Today fm's Tony Fenton or Gareth O'Callaghan.
One of the more peculiar things about 2fm is that its best-known DJs are the old guard - Gerry Ryan, Dave Fanning and Larry Gogan. People who have been with the station since it started over a quarter of a century ago rather than the newer voices of Jenny Huston, Dan Hegarty and Nikki Hayes.
It says something about the station's reluctance to nurture new talent and its instinct to promote the safe option. Seen in that context, recruiting Marty Whelan for the all-important breakfast slot and giving him a programme jingle last fashionable when prawn cocktail was an exotic starter makes a sort of illogical sense. On Wednesday, after playing Franz Ferdinand, Whelan remarked in one of his funny voices - that "that was for the young people". That said it all.
Later that day, having tuned in to The Brendan Balfe Show (RTÉ Radio 1, Mon-Fri) I idly switched back to 2fm in search of something with a bit more edge only to hear Larry Gogan (RTÉ 2fm, Mon-Fri)broadcasting from the National Ploughing Championships. Now there's a station determined to grow old with its listeners.
Truly perplexing for very different reasons was Just as there are Parentheses within sentences there are Parentheses within our lives (Documentary on One, RTÉ1, Sunday). Desmond Hogan is an enigma among Irish writers. As a child he devoured books in Ballinasloe library, writing stories and showing streaks of ambition by sending them off and having them published in the Atlantic Review at age 17. He won a Hennessy Award at 20 and, with Neil Jordan, founded the Irish Writers Co-op, which published his first novel, The Ikon Maker, in the mid-1970s. He moved to London where his reputation went from strength to strength but by the early 1990s Hogan had disappeared from the public and literary radar. Just why that happened to the writer who spent his time travelling around Europe and and the US was never explained or even explored in the documentary as presenter Peter Brown walked and talked with Hogan by a lake in Limerick, where he now lives.
Even the most straight-forward question was answered in Hogan's obtuse, rambling, repetitive way to the extent that it felt voyeuristic to be even listening to this clearly vulnerable man. "Tell me about your family," asked Browne. "The town park bench was the asylum, the university," began Hogan's answer, using an image he had already used at another point in the interview. A little more context from the presenter might have made better sense of the encounter.
The press conference announcing the decommissioning of IRA arms was broadcast live (RTÉ Radio 1 and BBCR4, Monday) and there was the inevitable feeling that it was one of those pieces of tape destined to be retrieved from the archive and played over and over again.
Buried amid the post-announcement fallout was an interview with a casual reference that jolted this listener. When an elected public representative talks about "the army", I'm quite confident that the default understanding for listeners is that what is being referred to is the Irish Army, Óglaigh na hÉireann, members of the Defence Forces. No further explanation needed. But when Sinn Féin's Mary Lou McDonald MEP, in that confident, combative tone of hers, referred knowingly to "the army" (Today with Pat Kenny, RTÉ1), Wednesday) it turned out she was talking about the IRA. The decommissioning prompted a debate on all current affairs programmes about Sinn Féin's new potential at the ballot box. You and whose army Mary Lou?
