RadioReview: You have to hand it to the people at Today FM, they come up with cracking good titles - Meet the Feckers is an inspired name for an outside broadcast tour.
This week Ray D'Arcy and his team took to the road in a camper van for their morning show. For part of the week they fetched up in a farmhouse in Cork and hung out with some surfers in Lahinch. D'Arcy provides an easy-going, often very funny, couple of hours of radio that zips along and he's helped by his team who sound up for anything.
On Tuesday, Mairead Farrell ventured into the milking parlour on the O'Connor farm. "Ray it's minging in here, the cows are disgustin'," said the Finglas woman who actually vomited on air, what with all the smells and the sight of the cow's bottoms. Farm Week it wasn't. With every heave she confirmed all those rural prejudices about concrete-loving city folk. The surfer dudes in Clare the following day sounded much more laid back - but maybe where they were smelled better.
Also in high, good form was David Kelly on The Tubridy Show (RTÉ Radio 1, Mon-Fri) with the veteran actor clearly loving the spotlight that his appearance in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has brought him. He's 76 and admitted that filming every day for six months was a bit on the tiring side but it was a happy shoot with the director, Tim Burton, reminding everyone that if they weren't enjoying themselves then there really wasn't much point in doing the thing.
Julie Myserson and Mark Lawson reviewing the movie on Front Row (BBC Radio 4, Monday) singled out Kelly for the sort of unanimous high praise that's rare enough on that arts show. They weren't quite so sure about Johnny Depp, because as Myerson pointed out, once you've heard all those Hollywood rumours that he modelled his character on Michael Jackson, then it's hard to get it out of your head.
Whatever Burton's movie cost to make, it's nice in a Luddite kind of way to hear that no matter how stratospheric the budget, most movies go through a post-production process that hasn't changed since the talkies came in. In the Footsteps of Brad Pitt (BBC Radio 4, Saturday) - a crowd-pleaser of a title if ever there was one - looked at the work of the foley artist - along with best boy it's one of those peculiar, incomprehensible titles that appear in movie credits. The name comes from Jack Foley - with a name like that I don't suppose you'd have to think too hard where he might have originally come from - who, at the start of the 20th century headed for California and ended up as a stunt man in Hollywood.
When Universal was making its first talkie he saw his chance and moved into sound and now a foley artist is someone who creates live sounds to go with the pictures. His granddaughter recalled that when Stanley Kubrick was making Spartacus he asked Foley to come up with a suitable sound for the Roman army on the march. Over the family dinner table Foley started jiggling a set of keys and there it was - or close to it. When it came to the actual recording, he included a few metal shower rings to really get the sound of clanking armour. And yes foley operators still use coconut shells to make the sound of horses' hooves and a box of gravel for footsteps. The programme's title came from one of the foley artists interviewed who has had to recreate Brad Pitt's footsteps many times.
A world away in every sense were the footsteps featured In the Sandals of a Saint (BBC World Service, Wednesday). Albanian journalist Irena Luto visited India to see the legacy of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Eight years after her death the work she started continues with the help of a seemingly endless supply of volunteers from all over the world. Her house is on the coach tour circuit and Calcutta is using her as a tourist attraction. "The volunteers have to be careful of the Jerusalem syndrome," said one Calcuttan, cynicism dripping from every word, "People go to the Holy Land at Easter and freak out and imagine they're God. People do come here and suffer from the same type of over enthusiasm for their work."
Mother Teresa's worldwide fame began in 1969 with a documentary made by the BBC's Malcolm Muggeridge. Even then people were more than happy to see miracles in her every action. The BBC cameraman declared Mother Teresa's house far too dark to film in, but Muggeridge insisted that the filming continue. Back in London the shots came out perfectly and there were murmurs of a miracle. For years the cameraman didn't admit that he had used the opportunity to test out a new type of light-sensitive film. The miracle of technology strikes again.
