If the BBC had been around exactly 100 years ago, we can be reasonably sure it would not have been frantically assembling thousands of hours of material to mark the impending turn of a century. That's because Auntie would surely have waited and lined up with the other arbiters of elite culture, who decided with soul-less arithmetic correctness that the century didn't turn until the end of the year 1900, not 1899.
Science writer Stephen Jay Gould's study of major periodicals from the era found no exceptions: from the New York Times to Britain's Nineteenth Century magazine - which didn't add And After to its title until the January 1901 edition - the 20th century wasn't welcomed until 1901. Technically, the same should apply to the millennium; the argument was made by some, but has largely faded from view. The Beeb and the rest of us have ceded to the more visceral logic which saw my daughter and I dangerously transfixed by the car's odometer as it changed this week from 110999 to the beautifully binary (and time-for-a-service) 111000. These musings arise because of The Century Speaks (BBC Radio Ulster, Saturday). Last week's Here was the first broadcast - actually, broadcasts, since each local area had a unique programme - to emanate from this project, which saw 6,000 ordinary people from all over Britain and Northern Ireland interviewed about their lives and their environments and how they have changed over the century. The press notes by project director Michael Green ask us to "imagine discovering an archive of audio tapes recorded in 1899" along the same lines.
Funny enough, the same extraordinary technological and cultural changes which have led to this populist, intuitively 99-year century also render The Century Speaks redundant in a way that it wouldn't have been 100 years ago. Don't get me wrong: it's a lovely idea and many of the voices are simply fascinating, but such a self-conscious and rambling "record" is unlikely to be the dream material of future cultural historians; the archive of ordinary 20th-century lives already contains millions of hours of sound and vision.
I can imagine those historians rightly stuck into Dear Old Daddy (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday), which re-told one of the century's great (and most "documentarised"!) radio stories from a new angle. Seamus Kelly's programme about William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw) followed the Nazi propagandist's now-elderly daughter, Heather Rose, to his grave and family home place in Galway.
It had many intriguing moments - not least the passing mystery of who has been leaving flowers on Joyce's grave - but none more than the multi-layered encounter between Heather Rose and a contemporary of hers, a local man who well recalled the broadcasts on the Philco wireless his own father had bought years before to hear news of the Spanish Civil War. Heather Rose recalled being allowed listen to her father's broadcasts in England after she'd done her homework. The Galway man recalled, with an audible chill, the ship's bell that Joyce rang after declaring "Germany Calling" - each ring representing 10,000 tonnes of Allied shipping sunk by the U-boats. He imagined the hatred British listeners, with family on those ships, must have felt for Lord Haw Haw. "I always said afterwards that they needn't have listened," Heather said. "They could have switched off or turned to another station."
"No, because he had a fantastic command of the English language - I'd say himself and Churchill were about equal in that respect."
"Oh, Churchill was a wonderful orator," Heather mused. "He gave us such courage."
"Joyce had a lovely voice, and you'd listen to him anyway, and he'd come out with things - which he did - like `How is everybody in Salthill?' "
`Don't criticise what you can't understand," Bob Dylan sang. Maybe for my sake he should have added: "Don't praise it either." That's the theme of recent correspondence to this column (usual address, or hbrowne@irish-times.ie - feel free, but no attachments please) about Lyric FM. How can a self-confessed classical-music ignoramus say that Lyric is doing a good job?
A particularly sharp letter asked me to imagine a sports station staffed by people who mis-identify players and know little about sport; or pop DJs who don't know what they're talking about when it comes to pop music. The short answer is that such imagining is not much of a stretch for real soccer fans forced to hear "Man United Man" Pat Kenny discourse on the game, or for popular-music lovers stuck with useless jocks who treat the tunes as aural wallpaper. That's why it's a cause for genuine celebration when a treasured, seasoned, knowledgable and enthusiastic presenter like B. P. Fallon gets a few weeks on Here Comes the Night Today FM), which he's doing at the moment. So is Lyric treating its raw material with the same ignorant disrespect that is the common currency of radio? Should I care, or just be glad that when Michael Comyn's programme is on in our house, the kids are calmer than if Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) or Ian Dempsey's Breakfast Show (Today FM) are blaring?
Well, both, if Lyric is to have its public-service remit taken seriously. And what do I say to the loyal Classic FM listener who says he doesn't bother with Lyric because it's too likely to be delving into esoterica or - worse - jazz? Where does it leave my own gut dislike of a playlist that apparently includes Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue but not Ellington's Diminuendo in Blue?
In the same column that I praised Lyric, in another flight of rhetoric I stupidly implied that Niall Stokes remains chair of the new IRTC board (and probably scuppered my chances of serving on the next one). It's with Conor Maguire in the chair that the IRTC will - all going well - meet late this month to hear the applicants for the new Dublin "niche" licences.
For a real fin de ecle siecle snapshot, you could do a lot worse than visit the Dublin Central Library in the ILAC Centre and read the shortlisted submissions - and the already-unsuccessful ones. The rejected application from Dublin Christian Radio (Solas FM) talks about the city's church-going population, Christian values and daily Mass incorporating the Irish language. In the shortlisted application for indie-rockers Spirit FM, on the other hand, the references are to the city's gig-going population and programmes in Chinese, Arabic and Spanish - and "The National Prayer Breakfast" is just the name of one of the bands endorsing the bid.
A real treasure: B. P. Fallon