Life's little ironies just have a way of getting richer and richer. There's RTE, in all-too-public agony about its future, facing resignations, reshuffles and a political battle about digital broadcasting, and into the wide open spaces of Studio 1, all the way from America, comes an object lesson in how to do public service broadcasting in a pluralistic environment. Or was it a cautionary tale?
I'm talking about A Prairie Home Companion, hosted by the inimitable Garrison Keillor - which for some reason, late last Saturday night, broadcast its two-hour programme to hundreds of stations on the US National Public Radio network from RTE's Dublin headquarters. This, in case you're not familiar with it, either from your own US travels or its appearances on Anna Livia FM in Dublin, is radio for real radio people, a couple of hundred of whom appreciatively packed Studio 1: intelligent conversation instead of slagging matches; great timeless music instead of pop pap; witty drama with clever sound effects instead of prank phone calls and fart noises.
Yep, real public-service broadcasting, complete with government subsidy. Did I mention that relatively few people actually listen to it? That's right, something less than 1 per cent of the US population tunes into A Prairie Home Companion, which makes Keillor rather more John Kelly than Gaybo. He's definitely no Howard Stern. Aaah, but they're a lovely little 1 per cent - lecturegoers, book-buyers, editorialists - and they give him a profile beyond anything mere ratings (his mere ratings anyway) could deliver.
What he delivers in return is Quality with a capital Q, comfortably aimed at middle-class, middle-aged, middlebrow middle America. Are you listening, Radio 1? Perhaps you've gathered from the tone that, for this reviewer, A Prairie Home Companion is an unacquired taste.
Which is not to say there were not pleasures to be had last Saturday night in RTE - it was highly entertaining, and the aural component of said pleasures will be available to listeners here, on RTE 1, tomorrow week at 9 p.m.; it's well worth checking out. But it was definitely more than an audio experience: in the US, radio-lovers make the pilgrimage to Minnesota to "watch" A Prairie Home Companion, and it's more than a bit like Woody Allen's Radio Days come down off the screen.
This is nostalgia served with only the faintest whiff of irony, as we watch, enthralled, the dickie-bowed sound effects man with his table of tricks and rubber vocal cords; the actors instantly changing voices and dropping script pages on to the "stage"; the production manager walking around making hand signals at everyone.
And mostly we watch Keillor, who can joke (almost) like Jack Benny and sing (almost) like Bing Crosby. We watch him when he's "on", all confidence, charm and wit. We watch him even closer when he's "off", his face suddenly sunk into profound ugliness, sitting upstage, his eyes closed or fixed in the distance, perhaps tapping his feet or mouthing the words of the music, peacefully awaiting the next transformation. He's a strange, self-assured, self-conscious mix, wearing a dark suit, but with bright red tie and socks; singing Great Balls of Fire, but with his hands in his pockets.
The real world of 2000 does not intrude. Amazingly, last Saturday, with Mozambique still plastered across our newspapers, he and FX man Tom Keith did a comedy routine which involved a death-defying rescue of a child and kitten by helicopter. And when Keillor unwisely decided to bring one of the characters from his famous Lake Wobegon monologues to Dublin, it was to a vision of decrepit, dolce far niente Phibsboro that would have been cringingly unlikely in 1955, let alone today. Keillor may be famed for eschewing sentimentality, but the poignancy was laid on pretty darn thick.
The highly literate Mr Keillor's insistence that the Dublin of James Joyce is alive and well will have pleased Bord Failte anyway, and while it was often patronising and got increasingly tedious, it did lead him up a few more fruitful paths. His companion on these jaunts was the wonderful Frank Harte, a slightly forgotten giant of Irish traditional music, who spoke well (he even got to utter the words, "post-colonial country") and sang even better, with material including The Brown and Yellow Ale and a dazzling piece of Joyceana from Finnegans Wake.
There was other beautiful music too, from Cathal McConnell and John and Valerie McManus. But mainly this was Ireland for Americans, with jokes about sweatshops in New York full of stepdancers and about "Irish Alzheimer's - you can't remember anything except the grudges". Okay, it's slightly more attractive than the mercifully unmentioned Celtic Tiger, but they can still keep it.
Anyway, there's no shortage of the real world, or reasonable facsimiles, on the wireless. On BBC Radio 5 Live, however, more often than not the documentaries slotted decoratively into the spaces between live sport and dead talk on the station are fairly abysmal, predictable exercises that, like a schlock thriller, give away all their best bits in their promo trailers. In fact, the promos invariably oversell even those half-decent parts.
That said, there are always exceptions, notably last weekend's Five Live Report (BBC Radio 5 Live, Sunday), Prisoners and the Peace, which smashed the quota for half-decent bits.
A paralysed RUC man meets former IRA prisoner Joe Doherty at a peace and reconciliation conference, and reporter Mandy McAuley - all 5 Live fast and brash in tone - talks to them both. Doherty was by a long shot the more "conciliatory" of the two, insisting that there was a mutual understanding that they were "both victims". The policeman has his doubts, recalling the many west Belfast people who never joined the IRA: "I would rather have my conscience than his". So, the programme insistently asked, can these ex-prisoners admit "personal responsibility" for their crimes? Nah, one of them comes rather close to saying that if you did that you'd end up like some, unnamed, people who can't live with themselves. Some reconciliation seems easier than others. Senior republicans and ex-loyalist prisoners have been seen, McAuley says, having coffee and chips in Ballycastle. "Exprisoners say they have a crucial role to play," she says, a certain scepticism in her voice.
However, we heard of constructive youth work being done by ex-prisoners - men with great credibility in their communities, however much some people might wish otherwise. One of them was particularly frank about the attraction of projects that cross the sectarian divide: "We're using each other to get whatever funds are there to help our communities . . ."
hbrowne@irish-times.ie