Now, correct me if I'm wrong (there's a redundant imperative if ever there was one), but wasn't there a time not so terribly long ago when the radio reviewer of The Irish Times was an annual guest of RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, for a glorious few days' festa to honour the world's best radio? Didn't the Prix D'Italia used to be a perk of this gig?
So what's the deal? Which has been devalued in this Murdoched media world: the worthy prize-giving, or just yours truly?
I'm not ruling out the latter - questions will have to be asked, you better believe it - but I suspect this grand Prix is of intense interest to a slowly dwindling minority of broadcasters. In the few years I've been doing this job, I've tended to see news of the Irish interest in the prizes not in a roaring blaze of PR, nor even in the faintly glowing embers of bumpf that are more usual for radio, but rather through a chance comment or a friendly encounter.
That, anyway, is how I came to know that another lovely autumn week in Tuscany ends tonight with the distribution of laurels in Florence. And that Irish radio is gloriously represented there by Mary Duffy's poetic and provocative documentary, The Lino Crossing - Tales of the Observed, first broadcast in March.
I'll bet Duffy knew where her programme would end up. How else to explain this crowd-pleasing passage for the Tuscan locals, early on: "The lino is rich and red, not wine, not maroon, but a dusty, musty, rusty rose red, like a good Chianti."
The close-up of the lino, which is evoked with rich olfactory detail, too, is part of Duffy's account of a key moment in the narrative of her own childhood drama, a crawl across the floor when she was just three years old. She, like the other people heard in her programme, has a physical disability.
That's not exactly startlingly new in itself. But this programme is special, not least for the way the key decisions, outlooks and testimonies of its subjects are not "affirming" in any glib way, but are often instead forms of refusal. Duffy's pre-school epiphany involved a conscious break from a pretence of sameness, as the child without hands deftly picked up a pencil with her toes.
BACK home in Ireland, a new documentary (another international prize nominee, too) was getting an airing, To the Stonebreaker's Yard (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday) - "a journey into the heart of patriotism". There you have it: choral music, crunching footsteps, the bit of Yeats: welcome to Kilmainham Gaol, with 1916 being evoked this way and that, from the words of the tour guides to the words of the proclamation. The yard of the title is where the leaders of the Rising were executed.
"Yes. Here are the real facts," a resonant male, then a female, voice kept telling us, with, surely, a post-modern smirk. To be sure, Lorelei Harris's programme was technically superb, clever and interestingly done. The tour de force of sorts was the description of the wedding of Joseph Mary Plunkett and Grace Gifford: a series of repetitions, using the voices of various guides, the sound of the video for tourists and readings from contemporary accounts, it failed, for me, to be any more than technically superb, clever and interestingly done.
Similar technique, with similar results, was applied to the executions. Emotional impact? Nah. Contemporary political significance? Nope, don't think so. An act of revisionism by aural deconstruction? Your guess is as good as mine. I did enjoy listening to it, though.
IT'S rare enough these days to hear anyone wonder what the men of 1916 died for. It's to his credit as an engaged and engaging broadcaster than you can nearly, just about, imagine Eamon Dunphy coming out with the line as he contemplates the line-up of Dublin 4 bankers telling the Dail committee how they came to cheat the State of millions of pounds.
The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) is consistently excellent, regularly hammering 5-7 Live (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) on issue after issue because of its more flexible and reflective format. The often rambling, always lively discourses of late between Dunphy and Shane Ross on the DIRT hearings, ably joined by Fintan O'Toole at times, have shown the show at its outraged and informative best.
It is a shame that it remains such a boys' club. It's not quite as exclusive and chummy a club as it used to be: Dunphy has graduated to a somewhat more challenging interview style at times, and, better yet, he was proud this Wednesday to accompany his fawning introduction of Liam Fay with an acknowledgement that Fay "thinks I'm an unctious creep".
WITHOUT a doubt, the growing army of Last Word listeners come for the sports and politics, but they stay for the comedy, a part of the programme which arose with wonderful spontaneity in its first year. It was good to hear last week that Today FM was extending its commitment to a good laugh, and to its listeners, by running a comedy-writing competition and producing (through one of the Last Word masterminds, Stephen Price) the winners as Six of the Best (Saturday).
Cork man Michael Moynihan's first show drew on a few old familiar-sounding incongruities - e.g. a Klingon ordering cod in batter and a Diet Coke in the local chipper; an Italian who's signed for Cork in time for the All-Ireland hurling final - plus the odd novel one - an oily Lothario answering techical queries on a computer company's helpline. It was all framed in an amusing spoof of the mid-Atlantic idiocy of so much Irish radio ("Refugees - what are they about?"). And the sketches were reasonably well acted by a selection of happily unfamiliar voices.
Lest we start handing out the Prix D'Italia for Today FM's imagination, generosity and public-service mindedness, we'd best note that Six of the Best is part-funded by the Independent Radio and Television Commission. Which is paid for by a levy on stations such as Today FM, so fair 'nuff.