What a pleasure to hear that Lyric FM audiences are steadily increasing. It was one of the scandals of Irish life that for so long we were without a classical music channel. We were paying our licence for public service broadcasting, to be sure, but little enough public service broadcasting did we get, and broadcasting classical music was as just about rare as Union Jacks in Crossmaglen.
Lyric FM changed that; it has become one of the great consolations of life in Ireland, not least because it has not gone down the Classic FM road of playing Nessan Bloody Dorma and the Bleeding Grand March from Ai-phuqqing-Eeda every five minutes. Indeed, thanks to Lyric FM, I have done what I once thought was impossible: I have fallen hopelessly in love with the music of Shostakovich.
Three damned tenors
Treading the careful path between rank populism and unbearable elitism is not easy, but the Lyric FM format seems to have done that - save for popular requests, when yet again those three damned tenors come leering out of the radio, time and time again.
Oh for a Ghurka's khukri, just to see those bonces bounding finally across the carpet . . .
Lyric FM has rightly accepted that both film scores and musicals deserve respect - for example, its recent celebrations of the centenary of Richard Rodgers, whose compositions have become deeply embedded in Western culture. And it has managed more modest but nonetheless worthy achievements, such as introducing us to Marnie Nixon, who provided the singing voice for Deborah Kerr in The King and I and Natalie Wood in West Side Story (which explains the mystery of Maria's strange English accent whenever she sang).
So, having got this much right, why does the station not have a policy of a uniform anglicisation of names? Apart from the splendidly unpretentious Seán Rocks, every single presenter seems utterly determined to show what superb linguists they are when it comes to pronouncing the names of lesser-known arias and composers, especially in Spanish.
Now this is a language which seems to bewitch even the most humble of football commentators into a glottal ecstasy. In Ireland, we speak English, and in English, we pronounce Paris as Parriss, not Pahgh-rhee, and Milan as Millann, not Milyahnoh: which is as it should be. But tempt radio broadcasters with the name Zaragoza, and what do they do but haul back, clear the pipes, inhale so deeply that their bottoms bulge, before unleashing upon a trembling world, Hhhagh-rrahgh-hhohagh, splattering the studio walls with saliva, their teeth and perhaps much of their bronchioles.
Naples not Napoli
Saragossa. They could have humbly mumbled Saragossa, the only way to deal with such a satanic selection of unassailable gutturals and aspirants. Saragossa, after all, is merely the name by which the city has been known for centuries in English, just as Torino is Turin, and Napoli is Naples and Firenze is Florence.
But no: there seems to be some sort of rule within their profession that the merest trace of a Spanish word, and broadcasters promptly start to suck in their stomachs like bullfighters, toss their heads like flamenco dancers, and then fill the airwaves with as much phlegm and lisps as you'd find at an agm of Manuels from Barghh-eghlo-nagh.
Look. It's Barcelona, Barsa-Lonah, all right? This is English, and we anglicise foreign names. We pronounce Beethoven or Bach or Tchaikovsky or de Gaulle or Stalin or Napoleon or Tolstoy or Michelangelo not as they would have done in their own languages, but in versions convenient to us. The last English-speaking broadcaster to try and pronounce Van Gogh the way that the Dutch do simply exploded in a mist of blood, and all that remained after the air had finally cleared was a bemused set of tonsils, gasping forlornly on the studio floor.
We say Van Gogh, van goff. The Americans say van go. Neither is remotely close to the Dutch, and so be it: we all prefer this convention, especially the people of the Netherlands, who weep - not a pretty sound, by the way: ghhuek, ghheuk, ghheuk - when they hear non-natives lowering themselves into the vat of congealed mucus that is the Dutch language.
Glugging noise
With a ghastly glugging noise, the foreigners swiftly vanish: a few flat bubbles might break the surface, and then it is over - the language invented by a man who was trying to cough up the contents of a spittoon which he had inhaled because he thought it was a steel tub of banana yoghurt, has triumphed, yet again.
We do not butcher our vocal chords trying to speak Dutch - so why the suspension of the normal rules of pronunciation when it comes to languages of the Iberian Peninsula?
Why cannot Victoria de los Angeles be pronounced as if she were the late Queen-Emperor from the home of Hollywood, rather than as Vittorr-riagh do Loth Anngg-haghhh-leetthhhh? Why is Heitor Villa-Lobos rendered as Heightorrrrr Veeeeeya Lhobothhhh, and not as it is clearly spelt? Why make it so very difficult after nice obliging foreigners like Victoria and Heitor had gone to such trouble to make it nice and simple for us?
Is this the inadvertent legacy left us by Fawlty Towers? Manuel seems to have created the indelible impression that Spanish names cannot be pronounced without a deep exploration of our bodily parts which other languages never reach.
Bullshit-detectors are instantly repressed the moment something remotely Iberian heaves into view, and broadcasters instantly flare their nostrils in expectation. That done, they then embark upon an ecstasy of lung-clearing, hissing and spitting in order to ask the simple question: Pretentious? Quién, me?