Say what you like about RTE Radio 1 - I know I will - but I haven't noticed heaps of other broadcasters rushing in with centenary tributes to the self-declared genius of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, 100 years dead. A couple of weeks back we heard a few of the too-rarely-explored linguistic wonders of De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol spread out before us by the voice of Alan Stanford on The Book on One.
And we have, ongoing, the Thomas Davis Lecture Series on Wilde (RTE Radio 1, Monday). This week, the Davis connection was particularly apt, because biographer Davis Coakley was tracing Wilde's connections with 19th-century Irish nationalism - including, but also beyond, the usual links of his mother, poet Jane Elgee (aka Speranza), with Davis's Nation brigade. Certainly, Wilde inherited a romantic love of the Young Irelanders. "Men who made their lives noble poems also, men who had not merely written about the sword, but were able to bear it, who not only could rhyme to liberty, but could die for her also, if need had so been," he wrote. The Home Rule movement, we heard, was to drive a wedge between Wilde and his Trinity tutor, J.P. Mahaffy. In Wilde's college days, however, there is no evidence of taking on his classmate Edward Carson in any Hist debates on the topic.
It seems Irish-America, on his famous speaking tour, brought Wilde face to face with his national and nationalist heritage: audiences in the US were more interested in Speranza than in aestheticism. In San Francisco he read two of her poems, to sustained applause. "Since the English occupation, we have had no national art in Ireland at all," he told them. "And there is not the slightest chance of our ever having it until we get that right of legislative independence so unjustly robbed from us, until we are really an Irish nation."
Today, the BBC World Service can ask: is the march of democracy unstoppable? BBC World Service Essential Guide to the 21st Century offered two Very Big Question episodes, presented by the always ambitious foreign correspondent, George Alagiah. In Democracy (Tuesday) he told us: "What passes for democracy, whether in Russia or Kenya, is more a matter of form than of substance." While Russia has descended into corruption and democratically endorsed despotism, Pakistanis, it seems, would much rather have their coup-created regime than the nominally democratic one that preceded it.
Alagiah fancies his own qualifications for guiding us into the global future. "My working life has been spent on the bloodsoaked ground of ideological battle." The Balance of Power (Friday) looked at the challenges to US global hegemony - the long shadow of the golden arches was evoked - and Alagiah suggested: "the natives are getting restless". The programme, however, didn't really take an awful lot of interest in the natives; instead, it descended from Alagiah's articulate opening to big geopolitical and military discussions about managing the Chinese peril and the rise of other potentially militant nationalities. After what Alagiah told us about Indian nukes, Bob Dylan's magnificent Masters of War takes on even wider, more lasting significance. P.J. Curtis played it on From Reels to Ragas (Lyric FM, Wednesday), from his own wonderfully scratchy vinyl copy of Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. What's more, Curtis also played a Fairport Convention version of the English folk song that was clearly Dylan's musical template.
In fact, Curtis played everything, from Tom Paxton to Swiss yodelling. Best of all was the "polyphonic style of vocalising" from Sardinia - right up there with the Bobs, whose amazing a capella version of John Lennon's Strawberry Fields Forever, complete with vocalised beeps, whirrs and distant trumpets, was played by John Kelly last week.
Curtis appreciates and explains so well that RTE is right to run the risk of overexposing him with a new Sunday programme.
Maybe it's invidious to compare a musicologist like Curtis with a "personality" like John Creedon, who's been settling into his noontime programme (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). But I can't see Curtis stumbling, as Creedon did Wednesday, into a gross misreading of a classic song, even in the interest of a segueway. Otis Redding's Dock of the Bay, Creedon told us warmly, "conjur up images of fishing and taking it handy". Which is a bit like saying - actually, a lot like saying - that From Clare to Here conjures up the pleasures of urban pub conversation. Although he may be one of the everswelling ranks of DJs who don't seem to listen, Creedon, it must be said, garnered high praise on Wednesday's Tonight with Vincent Browne, which took a long look at the plight of RTE Radio 1 in light of the JNLR figures. The topic was a little odd, because they were undramatic figures which were merely a small landmark on a long declining road for the station.
Let's get this straight: Radio 1 is not in inexorable decline in terms of programme quality, just in terms of audience share. It's nothing to be ashamed of; mostly it's just a sign of change in society and broadcasting. In many ways (in my opinion, need I say?), I'd say the station has more vitality than a couple of years ago: the process of change at the radio centre, sometimes disastrously handled behind the scenes, has got more things right than wrong on air. Whether we need a subsidised station with this unique mix of "public service" and commercially driven programming is a larger political question. What was unfortunate about Vincent Browne's programme is that only Colum Kenny mentioned, with no response from other panellists, the genuine political disaster which had befallen RTE that very day.
The Irish Independent story about the Government's volte-face on RTE's role in digital broadcasting (and the Government's confirmation of it) has far wider implications for the broadcaster than another tick of the clock counting down Radio 1's supremacy. It's too bad Browne's show went for the easier option of having someone (Eamonn Sweeney it was, and good too) slag Pat Kenny's musical taste, instead of trying to explain the story about digital. Mind you, it's an option I've often enjoyed myself . ..
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie