'Late Late' rites of passage revisited

Radio Review: The Late Late Show began as summer filler in 1962 and went on to become the longest running chat-show in the world, but what if it had been cancelled after the first season? That was this week's What If . . . (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday).

Colm Tóibín was an inspired choice of guest, as he created word pictures that vividly captured the growing-up-with-Gay years. He talked of "the rite of passage of being allowed to stay up for The Late Late," of "sitting in front of the telly with your whole family and the inevitable moment of pure embarrassment" when Gay Byrne unexpectedly introduced some sex-related topic and "in the pre-zapper days no-one wanted to be seen to be square and get up and turn it off".

The other guest, June Levine, who worked on the show, recalled ground-breaking programmes, such as the one with the "first unmarried mother in Ireland" (or the first to talk openly about it) and others which lifted the lid on a whole range of subjects from divorce to changes in the Church.

It wasn't a Late Late love-in - producer Peter Mooney included an excerpt from the Annie Murphy interview, which gave us Byrne at his most pinched-faced and cruel, and presenter Diarmaid Ferriter asked the hard questions, such as why did a show that was seen as an acute social barometer fail to talk about what was really going on, as in institutional child abuse and the links between big business and politics.

"We didn't know about that then," said Levine. Anyway, by the 1980s, the power had, according to Tóibín, shifted to Byrne's radio programme. Ireland was becoming more cosmopolitan and people started going out on a Saturday night. He summed it up by saying that everything would have come to light even if The Late Late Show had not gone on, "but more slowly and with less fun".

In contrast with this entertaining slice of pop culture, there was a strong whiff of intellectual superiority about The Invisible Thread (Lyric FM, Sunday), the arts interview programme presented by Theo Dorgan. Cartoonist Art Spiegelman was the guest but, frustratingly, there was no proper attempt to introduce the man's work to an audience who may, reasonably, never have heard of him. I subsequently learned (online) that Spiegelman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who spent 10 years at the New Yorker producing, among other things, their famously biting covers.

Not that I learned anything as straightforward from listening to the interview. Halfway into the show Dorgan finally mentioned Spiegelman's Maus graphic novels, referring to them, among other things, as "challenging essentialist ideas". No help there then. After another five minutes we at last got a comprehensible description of what the books are - "comic-book-style novels about the Holocaust". (Spiegelman won the Pulitzer for Maus).

Dorgan kept edging the tone high into the oxygen-less stratosphere but Spiegelman was thought-provoking, especially about his new-found passion for New York post-9/11 and about his Jewish identity (see Weekend, page 6).

Over on Rattlebag (RTÉ Radio One, Wednesday), old radio pro Ian Fox gave a mini-masterclass in how it's done - and boy, was he working with less promising material. Pavarotti has relased a new album of pop songs; worse than that, Italian pop songs. The snatches of Ti Adora sounded cheesier than the stinkiest Parmesan but in 10 minutes Fox managed to give a run-down on the big man's career (including the fact that his international début was in Dublin in 1963), rubbish the album and swat away Myles Dungan's trademark "joky" interjections.

The first myth to be debunked in the first part of a new series, The State We Are In (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday), was the old chestnut that Irish people are obsessed with home ownership because of some emotional, identity-driven hunger straight out of The Field. Both Mary Higgins, director of the Homeless Agency, and Tony Fahy, of the ESRI, convincingly suggested that the reason is more pragmatic: Government policy means it makes sense to acquire a valuable capital asset that is not subject to capital gains tax. It is cheaper to own than to rent, and unlike everywhere else in Europe, there is no property tax here. No Government spokesperson was on the programme to explain why this is the case or why first-time buyers have to compete in the market with well-heeled investors. Prices for second-hand homes in Dublin have, over the past nine years, increased by 343 per cent, according to presenter Prof PJ Drudy.

The vox-pops piled on story after story of couples who couldn't hope to buy a home, of endless time spent commuting, of the dire consequences of interest rate rises. It was enough to make you long for a simpler time before television brought sex to Ireland and the most shocking thing a bishop could hear on TV was a newly-wed telling Gay she didn't wear a nightie.