Yes, as the week began there was really one topic of conversation. But did the radio have to be so damned predictable in its approach to it?
More precisely, in its approaches: the Sunday chat programmes gave us a lot of blather: Marian Finucane (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) did a further trawl of the gossip with Kevin O'Connor; Today with Pat Kenny (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) dressed up gossip as analysis or outrage from various members of the political and media elite; Liveline (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Fri- day) brought us the startling news, direct from its listeners, that it's traumatic to discover one's spouse has been having an affair; The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Fri- day) managed to raise a few laughs courtesy of the Drunken Politician (revealing his affair with Lorraine Keane) and Navan Man, while Eamon Dunphy harped on about all the good Charles Haughey did for this country.
Under cover of darkness, Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday), in its self-appointed role as the audio equivalent of the Newspaper of Record, replayed the Terry Keane interview from The Late, Late Show; then its host, with a barrister's precision, honed in on the most boring and obscure (though no doubt Constitutionally Important) aspect of the Keane revelations, the question of the High Court appointment.
Meanwhile, the news bulletins ensured that the details of this extramarital affair wouldn't soften and humanise Haughey in the way the Starr Report served Bill Clinton - who, we learned, was lonely, hurt, pathetic. Charlie - we were reminded daily by the tribunal-talk - was a man with a keen eye on the value of all his transactions. Somewhere, squeezed into the schedule, you could hear William Trevor reading extracts from his own Felicia's Journey (The Book on One, RTE Radio 1, Monday to Fri- day). Still, for fans of genuine public service, it was a good week to listen to the BBC.
Wednesday's Afternoon Play on BBC Radio 4 should have been prescribed for the pundits pretending that wedding vows have a single, stable meaning. "Back then, there was only one way out of childhood: marriage. How many folk got married just to get away from home? Just to get away from those tiny houses? Him for a shag, her for an inside toilet - and their first decent holiday.
"Married. Just to get away from your mother with her mahogany and piano stool. Same reason half of us went to uni."
Kathleen Jamie's The Whitsun Weddings looked at the marriages of several people wed (like Charles and Maureen Haughey) in the 1950s. A clever, sometimes touching verse drama, it took the form of intersecting monologues by four characters. Through it all was a recording of Philip Larkin reading his wonderful poem of the same name, in which he observes newlywed couples boarding a train and beginning their married lives. Jamie's play is a piece of (informed) speculation as to what might have become of them.
The representative sample includes a widow composing her lonely-hearts ad ("Woman, 60, seeks . . . more of the same?"); a happy heart-attack survivor really celebrating his 40th anniversary with the missus; a sad, separated man in his bedsit; and, finally, one of the fruits of a Whitsun wedding, a thirtysomething woman (beautifully played by Saskia Reeves) reflecting, as quoted above, on her parents' lives in marriage and on her own, outside it - but with a child and many of the same compromises.
OF more Irish relevance was Tuesday's documentary, BSE, The Untold Story (BBC Radio 4). Over the last several weeks, Radio 4 listeners - a very low percentage of whom are connected to beef farming, I'll wager - have heard a definitive series on the controversial growth hormone BST as well as this provocative programme, which suggested that newvariant CJD may be getting into humans through inoculation (i.e., directly into the blood, by accident or through cow-serum in vaccines) rather than simply by ingestion of infected meat. This was scary, but not as scary as the reported Royal College of Surgeons report which estimates the number of future CJD cases: a few as a dozen, or as many as 13 million. Gotta love that scientific exactitude.
Oh, there's plenty of rubbish on the BBC. The documentaries on Radio 2, in particular, nearly always give the impression of a lot of money spent (by radio standards) for absolutely no good reason. David Puttnam's Century of Cinema, on Tuesday, is a vacuous example. Not only did we hear that Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper were genuine movie stars; we also heard that Tom Hanks is Jimmy Stewart for the Nineties; and we heard that Puttnam has actually told Hanks that to his face.
Tom's reply was not recorded.
Despair not. Back on Radio 4's Book at Bedtime, Gita Mehta was telling wonderful stories about Indian cinema from her book, Snakes and Ladders. The excesses of Bollywood movies - in which kissing was long banned as a western corruption, but the dancing would pop your zygotes - gave way to an extraordinary account of film-makers who raised funds by touring rice-fields in impoverished, rural Kerala with film-society favourites, admission roughly one penny: the peasants loved the al fresco screenings of Bat- tleship Potemkin, but greeted Hiroshima, Mon Amour with catcalls.
There is one station in Ireland dedicated to public service and nothing but. And it's the newest one: Dublin Corporation's Tra-vul Eff-Emmm, as the American-sounding jingle sings it. There's none of the romance of travel here on 106.8 FM: a five-minute, computer-governed loop summarises the traffic on the city's main routes and the spaces remaining in the various car-parks - with just the traces of a techno-pop beat in the background.
The station is predicated on the assumption that we'll only listen for five minutes at most, grab the relevant info and run; but it seems AA Roadwatch has whetted our appetites: there are commuters out there who would listen to this stuff all evening.