RADIO REVIEW: Leprechauns have their jobs to do too, don't they? And not just, as a sharp listener's citation to NewsTalk 106 reminded us, when the species consists of Roy Keane donning a leprechaun costume to advertise a brand of crisps.
ADIO REVIEW: Various unlikely-looking critters frantically waving their national flags may, indeed, be something of an affront to the liberal imagination, but they are also an utterly indispensable element of the World Cup, worldwide. For God's sake, let the leprechauns work without subjecting them to derision, abuse and discrimination; otherwise, the Equality Authority is going to start getting complaints. Perhaps this falls under recent part-time workers' legislation: some of the leprechauns in Japan have been telling RTÉ Radio 1 that when they are not employed as leprechaun flag-wavers, they fall into another strange sub-species, "football people", running the clubs and youth centres that keep the game going in Ireland.
It's not entirely clear whether Eamon Dunphy accepts such fans' "football people" credentials, since he appears to reserve this elite category for ex-professionals with inside knowledge of the English game - men only, it hardly needs saying. (Presumably, Last Word pundit Mark Lawrenson still fits into the football-man category, in spite of his virtually accusing Eamo - on BBC TV on Thursday morning - of conducting a "witchhunt" against Mick McCarthy.) It should also hardly need saying that Dunphy is entitled to his categories and his opinions. The job of journalist/pundit/critic is entirely different from the equally honourable role of flag-waving leprechaun (in spite of ample media evidence to the contrary) and he is entirely correct to insist on the distinction.
(On Wednesday, he even insisted that his journalistic scruples mean he has "a conflict of interest" with his biographee, Keane; he also acted as an equal-opportunity stirrer, reporting "from the horse's mouth" about unhappiness in the England camp.) Nonetheless, there was an air of desperation about this week's love-him-or-hate-him promotion of Dunphy as the antidote to a national disease of complacent self-congratulation.
The radio ads for his newspaper column jostled for airtime with the equally opportunistic, but more satisfying, "Believe" stout advert.
On Wednesday's edition of The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday), presented by Matt Cooper - because Dunphy had his gig at the RDS - the promotion of the regular presenter got out of hand. Eamo featured, rantingly, in a post-match panel discussion, and hardly had it finished when Cooper was promising listeners who had managed to miss it that it would be repeated before the end of the programme. (There were other panellists, but there was no doubt in Cooper's promo that the "news value" consisted of hearing Dunphy again; Lawrenson's contribution had consisted heavily of him trying to shut-up whoever was in the room while he was trying to talk on the telephone.) No, Dunphy didn't disappoint, if you're into that sort of thing.
"I wanna bleedin' revolution!" he declared. This was not, apparently, a return to his socialist youth, because Dunphy's preferred football revolution would be modelled on the ultra-capitalist successes of Paul McGuinness and the International Financial Services Centre, he told us.
The programme's tireless crusade for its presenter meant we got to cringe, not once, but twice, as Dunphy launched, rather sweetly, into Kennedy-esque: " . . . I look at what might be and ask, 'why not?'. " He did seem to be enjoying his role. When, on Tuesday, a listener asked Dunphy if he'd be watching the next day's game wearing a Germany shirt and swastika, he didn't demur, but laughingly, in stage-Nazi voice, introduced "Herr Ian Nochter" for the news headlines. Nochter, well used to Dunphy's messing, was clearly a little thrown, and suggested that at least Eamon could leave off the swastika. Nervous Nochter proceeded to make a brilliant Freudian slip about the Fianna Fáil-PD "pogrom" for government.
Dunphy referred self-consciously early in the week to the "mood of the nation", as though it centred upon him. Thankfully, it didn't (reading tabloids can be misleading): the mood of innocent excitement conjured up by football games on foreign fields was captured far better in one moment of Thursday's Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), when Des Cahill, in Japan, mentioned parenthetically that Senegal had just equalised with Denmark, and Áine Lawlor replied with an eager "have they?!". Or, if you prefer your "mood of the nation" a bit more parochial, there was the thrilled voice of another woman presenter, Rachael English on 5-7 Live (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), telling Gabriel Egan that she'd love to listen all evening to the tape of his commentary on Robbie Keane's goal. Then, cleverly noting that RTÉ could "do with a few bob", she suggested that the clip could be made available on a premium phone line! Egan's uncharacteristically manic reaction to the goal was indeed wonderful, only slightly ruined by his (also uncharacteristic) misidentification of the player who delivered the pass leading up to it.
DUNPHY'S "mood of the nation" reference on Tuesday was actually in the context of a segment about the jubilee celebrations in Britain. Roy Greenslade's churlish and virtually nuance-free moaning that followed was much less engaging than the often wide-eyed coverage on BBC radio over the course of the day's parades and parties.
It wasn't especially reverent. On Late Night Live (BBC Radio 5 Live) they brought a couple of historians into the studio to dish the dirt on the history of royalty, much to the evident delight of listeners who phoned in with gossipy questions.
On another programme, 5 Live Drive, the presenter and her cultural-historian guest compared the London parade to a kitschy seaside pageant, virtually impossible, they said, to "send up". Or, as the guest put it: "If we were ironic about it, that would be typically British too, wouldn't it?". The sketch programme Dead Ringers (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday) got quite down and dirty, with the queen menacing Camilla Parker-Bowles with ghetto threats and the warning that "no one tries to look older and uglier than me in this family". Subtler was the sketch about the jubilee of the Today programme: "In its silver-jubilee year in 1977, people up and down the country held street parties where they sat at trestle tables with microphones and interrupted each other." Then a voice like Prince Phillip's reminisced about a visit from Today's John Humphrys: "We were just ordinary members of the royal family. But he went around to every one of us and asked us what we did. And do you know, none of us could answer."
Not all national moods are so easily manipulated or satirised. The mood of the American nation seems to have been entirely unaffected by the astonishing US victory against Portugal on Wednesday. That could change, of course, and as one ex-CIA man told Simon Mayo (BBC Radio 5 Live): "If you think certain people resent the US as a nation now, wait 'til we get to be a power in world soccer".
hbrowne@irish-times.ie