Radio ReviewWhoever decided on the pre-election broadcast blackout on Wednesday gets my vote, writes Bernice Harrison
What a relief after all that noise to turn on the radio and for it to be mostly as bland and directionless as the stuff pumped out in the news-free days of August.
It's wasn't entirely election-free. The Morning Ireland team (RTÉ Radio 1) couldn't quite help themselves and dished up a mesmerisingly dull and confusing item on how proportional representation works. If that didn't make listeners terrified of making a bags of their single transferable vote then nothing will. On The Last Word(Today FM), Matt Cooper, also suffering from election coverage withdrawal, came up with his own item "explaining" our PR system, and it wasn't much more enlightening. Maybe there's a case, in the 24-hour election blackout period, to air a public service radio campaign to encourage people to actually vote, and maybe - if some bright advertising type can figure it out - to come up with a way of explaining our PR system to first-time voters. If we keep crowing about how much better it is than Britain's first-past-the-post system, then it would be an idea if the general electorate - not just political anoraks - knew how it works and how best to use it.
Much more accessible, if happily daft, was Mario Rosenstock's Gift Grub ( The Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show, Today FM, Tuesday), where "Keith Duffy" hilariously explained how to actually vote, starting with going to the polling station and bringing photo ID, "ideally of yourself personally", and so on.
The point at which I realised that, after listening to three weeks of political coverage, I was sorely in need of the moratorium was when I tuned in mid-show and heard the Sesame Street song, People in Your Neighbourhood( The Ray D'Arcy Show, Today FM) and automatically assumed some political party or other had adopted Big Bird's best tune as their canvass anthem. It's not so far-fetched. Last week I heard the risible Aon Focal Eile being used by some candidate or other - happily I've blanked out the details.
D'Arcy's Sesame Street item was a real trip down memory lane. He interviewed Caroll Spinney, who voiced Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch for 37 years. Spinney talked of how the show changed the way children are taught in the US as it pushed knowledge of the alphabet to the fore. It's possible, too, that it changed the way our children learn their alphabet - before Sesame Street ours ended in a zed, not a zee. Spinney seemed quite astonished when D'Arcy said that in Ireland "muppet" is now a term of abuse. The same hasn't happened in any of the hundreds of other countries where Jim Henson's show airs.
Fiona Looney, introducing her panel show Backchat (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday), referred to the pre-election moratorium. "It's when we pretend it's not happening and never speak of it again, much as we do when our Olympic swimmers fail drug tests." She told her panel - Pauline McLynn, Joe Taylor and Morgan Jones - that this was their last chance to "make cheap jokes about Enda's contract and Bertie's house. In fact, if Bertie had signed Enda's contract when he bought his house he could have saved himself a lot of trouble". Backchat is fresh and funny, thanks largely to Looney's deadpan delivery and her scripted links, which sharply reference the week's news
That puts it in contrast with that talk-radio institution Quote . . . Unquote (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday), which now sounds jaded and tired. This week's programme, the first in a new series, was the 400th edition of Nigel Rees's show, and it sounds it. The creaky old panel included editor of The Oldie Richard Ingrams and novelist and barrister John Mortimer, who had a hard time keeping up with the gentle pace. Even on this sleepy programme there was no escaping politics - the first set of quotes was about the ousting of British prime ministers, favourites being "Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy" (to Ramsay MacDonald) and "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, go" (to Neville Chamberlain). Arabella Weir was like a breath of fresh air, but her presence just highlighted how fusty the show has become. In the round featuring quotes on Paris, she failed to guess Casablanca's "We'll always have Paris". "What was going on in Paris during that time?" asked Rees in a patronising way. "The bloody second World War," said Weir, "I'm not that thick." An example of a programme still on the shelf way past its sell-by date.