Reviews, repeats and New Year resolutions

Radio Reviews: It was a week of reviews and repeats although there were some fine original broadcasts - the trick was to listen to them live because RTÉ's normally excellent audio playback service (whereby listeners can log on to the RTÉ website and hear programmes they missed) was out of service during the Christmas period.

(A small plea to the Lyric schedulers, any chance of a repeat of The Medusa (Lyric, Sunday), Fishambles's production of Gavin Kostick's one-hander starring Brian Cox in one of his rare appearances on Irish radio?)

The highlight of the radio week was Dr Mary Robinson's Inaugural Michael Littleton Memorial Lecture, (RTÉ1 Wednesday). Depending on how you chose to listen to our former president's reflections on human rights and globalisation, the 90-minute broadcast was either a sobering bucket of cold water hurled on the Christmas excesses or an optimistic call to action and a timely reminder that New Year's resolutions can be about more than losing a few pounds or being nicer to your sister-in-law.

Globalisation can't be easily defined by a swoosh or some other handy symbol (although it often is). She talked instead about the power shift in our world from the public to the private,be they brand-building transnational corporations or groups such as the World Trade Organisation.

A Dr Robinson lecture is never going to peppered with witty bons mots or thigh slapping but what she was saying about her experiences in the UN High Commission and her time since working for human rights was uncomfortably engrossing. She is frequently asked what the biggest human rights issue is and her answer always confounds her questioner when she says that it is poverty. The statistics tripped off her tongue. Some 2.4 billion people lack access to basic sanitation; 6.3 million children die ever year from hunger; there are nearly 11 million AIDS orphans; in Botswana, the average life expectancy for a man is 41 - the roll call of inequality kept coming.

It's small weapons that are the real weapons of mass destruction and she talked about her involvement in a campaign to curtail their availability. Guns are now so much a part of normal life in Somalia, she said, that children are routinely named Uzi and Aka.

Referring directly to radio, Dr Robinson remarked on its immense power as a medium, describing how in Rwanda broadcasts prompted massacres and three journalists there have subsequently been tried and convicted for war crimes.

She spoke on her time as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and about the tidal wave of rhetoric that arrived at her door. Her office was only given 2 per cent of the UN's budget and that, she suggested, put the breast beating in stark perspective.

The lecture was recorded the week before Christmas in front of an audience and when asked for practical advice, she said that as an optimist she believes individuals can make a difference, from lobbying local politicians for human rights-based immigration legislation to buying only goods that are made without exploitation.

Another broadcast of a live performance provided the most easy listening entertainment of the week when Gay Byrne interviewed Neil Armstrong on Face to Face (RTÉ1, Wednesday). He has the travel story to top them all and he's undoubtedly been dining out on the exact same anecdotes for over 30 years now, but it is the mark of a consummate pro that he made every yarn sound fresh, from his feeling on leaving Earth ("the Earth rotating behind us, we were in the inky blackness and I thought, uh oh") to the powdery surface of the moon.

The most hilarious part was his descriptions of the computer on board. On his first rocket, the computer had 4k of memory but by the time of his moon-walk mission, Apollo was powered up with two 70 lb computers with 2k of RAM and 32k of memory; there are children's toys this Christmas with more power.

Given the same likelihood of failure and the long list of untried things that could go wrong, the Apollo missions would never happen today, he said, simply because we are now more cautious and averse to risk. Armstrong sounds like the most easy-going of men but maybe that's inevitable with his sort of perspective on planet Earth.

On New Year's Day there was a sort of self-help programme, My New Year's resolution is . . . ? (RTÉ1, Thursday) where different experts gave advice on how to make resolutions and keep them, including Colm Rapple's financial advice (try not to overspend on your credit card . . . bit late for that there, Colm). Gerry Anderson had the best line in daft resolutions (borrowed from Robin Williams): "Carpe diem or seize the fish."