Advertisements, by day, on Dublin's FM104 have been swearing blind that FM104 by night has changed. The message isn't entirely clear, but it sounds like an admission that the local late-night phoneins had become a turn-off, and a promise that, to put it bluntly, the Adrian Kennedy Phone Show isn't quite so pig-ignorant any more.
Frankly, I hadn't listened in ages, and found it hard to believe that the programme could have evolved into anything other than a forum for overwrought working-class callers to tar each other "slappers" and "scumbags". Still, I checked it out (who says advertising doesn't work?).
And sure enough, I heard an awful racket of a row between a posh-sounding man and a posher-sounding teenage girl. They got terribly overwrought, and Adrian let them away with some dreadful language.
"You're a very rude man," said the girl. "Pleeease don't tawk to me like that, you ignorant buffoon."
"You young pip!"
I swear (although rarely like that.)
This near-Wildean standard of repartee was matched by near-competent moderation of the discussion from Kennedy. So the ads were true: things really have changed!
The topic exercising the city was mobile phones for children - fer or agin'? And the programme used the long-established formula of setting up an extreme, perhaps slightly loopy straw man who would upset so many listeners that they'd phone in to shoot him down.
The funny thing is - and maybe it just shows that I'm out of touch - the straw man was adopting what I regard as the only reasonable position: mobiles for young teens and pre-teens are unnecessary and potentially hazardous, so just say no. In an hour's listening, I didn't hear a single caller agree with him.
Mind you, this same posh Patrick had some fairly grating rhetorical flourishes all right. His favourite schtick was to interrupt each of his opponents early on with: "You are a bad parent!" He also took it upon himself to enforce what are apparently the programme's new linguistic standards: one caller's old-fashioned "listen here, mate" was greeted with a prissy "I am not your mate" response from Patrick.
His opponents' capacity for denial about mobile phone risks was, however, far more annoying. We were back in the paranoid-parent territory of last week's column, where the urban-mythical "paedophiles going around in vans" justify every form of "protection", including the highly dubious one of allowing your eightyear-old to hold a microwave-radiation emitting device up against his or her brain several times a day.
And Patrick had the best line, in response to suggestions that he needed to get cool with the new technology: "I don't care if it's part of the IT revolution. If it was part of the industrial revolution and you got run over by a steam engine, would that make it good?"
Kennedy was really pretty good, peppering the conversation with that rare phone-in commodity, information. Now, it was mainly half-remembered stuff about mobile dangers from a programme last year, not anything so posh as proper new research to contextualise this discussion. But it helped, and he was clearly alarmed by the young caller who said she spends "between £20 and £50 every week" on her phone.
Then we got an amusing reminder about the commercial context for such a chat. On the air came the Meteor ad in which the idiot stays, silently, on her mobile to the Meteor rep; she's "just thinking about" all the money she's saving by spending more time on the phone. Talk about your false economies.
What Adrian missed is that all this may become a thing of the past. Only the previous evening on Late Night Live (BBC Radio 5 Live), an intriguing conversation in the business section of the programme revealed how Vodafone and One-to-One are beginning to get fed up with their juvenile users.
It seems that pre-paid phone use is just too popular. The companies apparently regarded the idea initially as a good way of hooking mobile users, who could then be lured into contracts. But the lure has turned out to be insufficient and, what's more, loads of these customers - as the kids on Adrian's show told us - use their phones largely to send text messages and to play games.
That's (relatively) good news for parents, because it means that at least kids are keeping the health hazards of handsets literally at arm's length. I've no doubt it's also quite profitable for the phone companies, but seemingly not profitable enough - not when the cheap handsets have been subsidised by the companies in order to attract bigger business. The real problem for the suits will come with the upcoming third-generation phones: they want to get users on contracts for those wee information-packed wonders, but few sane people will be willing to go through phonecards as quickly as those phones will gobble up the credit.
posh-sounding and articulate teens were elsewhere on the radio too. Lyndsey O'Connell of the Union of Secondary Students seemed to spend Wednesday at RTE. On Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), she worked her way nervelessly through a complex metaphor about the teachers taking the nuclear option and finding the fall-out blowing back into their faces. Whew! - maybe she was taking inspiration, and material, from German youth.
She again personified coolness under pressure when questioned by Rodney Rice on After Dark (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday to Thursday). Perhaps she lost a bit of streetcred with her revelation that she hadn't walked out of school last week; and she disappointed boring old rads like myself when she suggested, in the lingo of millennial youth, that the new union was addressing "a gap in the market" (yuk, market.) But O'Connell played a blinder, even in the face of slightly patronising chatter from Rice (sneering at teens' addiction to text-messaging) and more-than slightly patronising and tediously bureaucratic droning from some principals' representative.
All this teacher talk has been the vehicle only for humour of the unintentional sort; perhaps we can look forward to Charlie and Bernadine in the Laughter Lounge when this is all finished. They might find, of course, that it's harder to get a laugh when you're billed as comedy, as is The Folks On The Hill (BBC Radio Ulster, Saturday), which starts this morning (I got the tape.)
If it's amusement you're looking for, turn to Arthur Mathews's column. No, I don't care if you've read it already, it's still going to be funnier than The Folks On The Hill. This programme reckons, in the manner of the decadent period of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, that the corniest, most dated gag is funny so long as you say it with a thick Belfast accent. Whereas, in reality, it's about as funny as George Best's liver.
And a whole lot less funny than Brian Cowen making an appeal to high political principles. Wednesday's launch of the Government's position paper on the Nice Treaty saw Mark Little, for the News At One (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), somehow avoid audible sniggering when he interviewed the minister. Mind you, if Little, now RTE's foreign affairs correspondent, is going to keep giving Cowen and co such an easy ride on this forthcoming referendum, Brian is going to be the only one laughing.