RADIO REVIEW: You've got to hand it to Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday). He says what he believes, no matter how controversial, unpopular or, indeed, unlikely.
Last week, for example, in the face of Michael Dwyer's attempts at correction and clarification, Ryan insisted that Tennessee Williams had written To Kill a Mockingbird.
This week, while the people of Ireland were still shaking their heads in disbelief at the news from Tory Island, Ryan suggested that Cabin Fever and last weekend's debacle represented the very best of the human spirit, or something like that.
On Monday, Ryan interviewed Coco Productions' shipshape-sounding MD, Stuart Switzer, who, in Ryan's own words, is "no stranger to the Ryan show". That hint of past schmoozing should have been some clue as to the schmoozing to come.
"It was a grand project, wasn't it?" Ryan intoned about the reality TV programme. (Yep, it was a regular Marshall Plan.)
"Very wise," he later murmured, as Switzer explained that a psychologist had been flown to Tory. And flying the solicitor in? You guessed it. "I think it was very wise to send Gerald Kean up . . . Nobody will be able to stand back and look at what you've done and be able to say anything other than that you've acted with impeccable credentials."
These assertions, however eyebrow-raising, are quite possibly true. You can't say the same for much of Ryan's hyperbolic ranting about David Beckham on Wednesday. Manchester United, Gerry, is a very big soccer club but a rather small plc with barely significant overseas revenues, not "one of the biggest media companies in the world". Yes, he really said that, and no, you wouldn't see Rupert Murdoch earning two-fifths of his revenue from a fortnightly gathering where people pay to watch football, read programmes and eat meat pies. Still, Ryan won't let the facts stand in the way of a story, in this case the tragic tale of a football team who were right on the shoulder of AOL Time Warner before they threw away their most valuable asset.
You can be too frank and forthright. Louis Walsh's more realistic view of the relationship between celebrity and business got him in all sorts of bother when he suggested the Special Olympics might not be must-see TV, and that celebrity involvement might be motivated by ego. Despite the suggestion by newspaper reviewer Michael O'Kelly on Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) that Walsh should "stop digging", I reckon Walsh's record with TV and celebrity egos means we could legitimately bow to his expertise.
The media walloping of Walsh doesn't bode well for the prospect of bypassing the cant that characterises discussion of disability. Still, RTÉ, in particular, has endeavoured to use the event to explore how people with disabilities are treated when they're not posing with celebrities and playing games with the Kennedys. On one Morning Ireland interview, David Hanly spoke to Joan Downey, mother of Aidan, who will play basketball for Ireland next week but lose his "training workshop" place soon after. It became clear from the interview that the "training" doesn't necessarily culminate in a place on some phantom employment ladder. It may even help get the State off the hook when it should be making long term provision for meeting people's special needs.
Ryan, Walsh and Hanly haven't been guests yet on community radio show Telling It Like It Is (Anna Livia FM, Wednesday), but Sinn Féin panellist Killian Forde wasn't far behind such plain-talking chaps in living up to the programme's title. Even while the SF leadership was exhorting the UUP to get behind the Belfast Agreement, Forde was offering a frank grassroots assessment of the deal, a "least worst option" to which there was "no alternative". Devolved government in the North? "No republicans wanted Martin McGuinness as a minister in Stormont; nobody wanted that." Presenter Joe Kelly interrupted: "Martin McGuinness wanted it?" Forde: "I'm sure he didn't want it. This galls us. This is a bitter pill to swallow."
Interestingly, however, the SF representative presented a previous bitter pill, the Treaty, as having had a surprising honey-and-nougat centre. The 1998 agreement could prove to be like the 1922 one, "a stepping stone. It is one treaty, and one stepping stone away from a united Ireland." With revisionism in full flow, Kelly asked about the Sunningdale Agreement 30 years ago. Forde shrugged off two decades of carnage between that deal and the latest one with no claims that the new agreement is any better, just an admission that realism had eventually prevailed. In 1973, he said, "republicans would have felt that they were on a roll, and that they could win the war by military means". And a generation of listeners felt a chill run up their spines.