It's A commonplace of conversation among a certain class of listener. Even while we complain about any and every thing in RTE Radio 1's daytime schedule, just after we've unprintably slandered Aine-Richard-David-Marian-Pat-John-Sean-Joe-Myles-Ronan-Rachael and possibly Des, like a reflex we add, reassuring each other: "There really is some superb programming in the evenings though".
In her 5-7 Live interview about the listening statistics a couple of weeks back, the one disappointment RTE's director of radio, Helen Shaw, permitted herself to express was about the low numbers tuning in to the terrific evening programmes. Even a source as oracular as an Irish Times leader not too long ago proclaimed evening radio the real home of the broadcaster's public service remit.
Nonetheless, it's in those hours that, it seems, most of the public doesn't especially wish to be served. Most people don't notice Radio 1 in that time, and it's not only television that dims its light - it's consistently hammered after 8 p.m. by 2FM and the commercial competition.
Ah, how different things once were. There was a time when a varied and interesting diet, such as the one Radio 1 offers, got listeners' juices flowing in the evening. Why, Hollywood stars even happily starred in . . . wait for it . . . radio drama.
That era is conjured up in a new series presented by the maestro of Irish evening radio, Tim Lehane. Stars and Crackles (RTE Radio 1, Monday) takes us back to that time, two generations ago, when two media were enjoying their Golden Ages. (Don't mistake this column for a nostalgist: I reckon radio and the movies are both still wonderful, but both enjoyed definitive periods a full half-century ago, quite early in their own histories.)
Anyway, cue fanfare. And an all-American announcer: "Bold Venture! Adventure, intrigue, mystery, romance - starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, together in the sultry setting of tropical Havana, and the mysterious islands of the Caribbean. Bold Venture!" Clearly, one medium in 1951 wasn't above exploiting, and just-about-parodying, the characters and conventions that had been established in the other. Bold Venture went out as a weekly series back then, with Bogey (as Slate Shannon) and Bacall (as Sailor Duvall) doing what came naturally, and mind's-eye visuals courtesy of the silver screen.
Lehane brought us a priceless episode, even if most of the ingredients were distinctly cut-rate: hard-boiled dialogue, dancing Cuban boys, a calypso chorus and suspense-charged quests through dark alleys, empty beaches and tropical pleasure houses. B & B, surprisingly enough, sound more committed to their roles than some of the (unidentified) supporting cast. I did rather like King Moses, the West Indian always ready with a song or a suitably demotic comment: "So far it been a beautiful night, full moon and no shadow of police".
Lehane also presents and produces Sounds Like . . . (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday), which this week offered Puck Fair: A Sound Impression from 1947, from roughly the same era as Bold Venture but from the opposite side of the Atlantic and a different radio aesthetic - though the two programmes shared a few colonial echoes.
This was the BBC's on-the-spot take on the Killorglin festivities, opening with a gloriously round-about market-day conversation about a bid that might or might not be made on an unnamed horse or heifer: "I could bid you good day if I want to". A few bids clearly got made, because we heard that £40,000 worth of livestock changed hands at the fair, which would explain why the baron of the fair, entitled to a shilling tithe on every transaction, sounded so cheerful.
He and the programme's presenter, a plummy-accented Irishman called Brian George, apparently belonged to a pre-ironic era when you could say, without audible smirk, that there was "an atmosphere of infectious gaiety", or that the origins of Puck Fair "are lost in the mist of antiquity". A travelling showman with, we were told, money pinned all over his clothes, cried out "Last year, 11 times I was married, and each time I had a rich mother-in-law . . ." Anyway, that was then. In the here and now, it's not entirely unheard-of for someone with star quality to go near a radio play (though it ain't Brad Pitt and Cameron Diaz), and RTE Radio 1 proves as much on Tuesday evenings this month by presenting adaptations by four "name" poets of classical Greek drama. This week, it was the turn of Brendan Kennelly's new version of The Trojan Women of Euripides, and the spectre of Hecuba as mother-in-law from hell.
"The war is over./ The old style is with us still./ Kill and love./ Love and kill." No better man to be dependably anti-war and pro-women than good old Brendan Kennelly, but not all his verse was worthy of these stirring monologues, in which women resist transformation into post-war commodities, the booty of Greek victory. It was at its best when simplest: "Yes, Cassandra sleeps in the king's bed./ Her body burns and cools at his will./ It is her good fortune . . ."
Cassandra's own emotional descent was suitably nasty and crude, but just a tad pedestrian. "It is his death that I will sing./ Love will kill a king and kill a king and kill a king."
Still, The Trojan Women was clear and strong, well acted by the women anyway - Fedelma Cullen a powerful Hecuba - and Kennelly surely doesn't need the help of a new series on the BBC World Service, Writer's Workshop (Thursday and Friday). A future programme in the series promises to offer help for writers of radio plays, but if it's in any way as banal as this week's discussion with two novelists about their craft, we won't expect any early improvement in the state of the art.
"Michelle, how important is character development to you?" Writer Michelle Roberts managed to avoid answering that "question". The most telling comment in the programme, for ambitious listeners, must have been her cautionary line: "Write a novel only if there is no alternative". Such a shame no one spent an evening thinking of an alternative to this profoundly dull piece of radio.
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie