The power of the radio to bridge time was achingly evident last week. Suddenly, we again approached with dread the top of each hour, when the news bulletins brought us back to a period for which only sociopaths could be nostalgic. The old nightmares became new again. The familiarity of the going-nowhere talks process is bad enough. The return of the body count is unbearable.
The kindness of a reader, who sent me a tape of January 13th's Play of the Week from RTE Radio 1, The Way We Were, helped this column away from this nation's recurring tragedy to that of South Africa. Hal Bruce's drama, adapted from his stage play, effectively uses the technique of the ambient radio news headline right at the start, to situate us in an awful time and place: ". . . arrested in the early hours of the morning by the police special branch . . . Acting on a tipoff by neighbours, the police allegedly found him and his black servant girl embracing and kissing in his living room. Each will appear in a separate magistrate's court tomorrow."
That radio news story has nothing directly to do with the play that follows, but it tells us that the context is Cape Town in the 1960s, with the apartheid laws against racial mixing at their height and reformist student activists in the white universities just getting up their courage.
The man listening to that bulletin is an unreformable old Boer, Danie Kruger, who sits making models of Afrikaaner ox-wagons; his English-born wife and liberal daughter, meanwhile, try to persuade him of the need for reform. The arrest of his future son-in-law Peter does nothing to soften his attitude.
As this suggests, the tensions and oppositions in The Way We Were are not subtle - and Danie is an old dote compared to the stage-Nazi cops who interrogate Peter. Nonetheless, the play is often powerful and fascinating, its characters' various attitudes all too-credible.
The white heroes of South African-set films such as Cry, Freedom and the The Power of One pander horribly to western audiences. However, the intimate (and low budget) setting of a radio play is ideal for probing apartheid's effect on an "ordinary" white family.
Bruce exposes a grosteque absurdity of the system and its effects on mentalities: Peter is forced to leave the country when the police dig up evidence that his great-grandmother was part "coloured"; even his stand-by-her-man, liberal fiancee pauses to consider the implications of having brown babies. The Way We Were might leave listeners wondering about South Africa's "happy ending".
LAST night's Thomas Davis Lecture was another, less poignant evocation of the way we were. As part of a series to mark 150 years of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, Finola Kennedy crunched the numbers to produce a fascinating, if truncated, account of family life in Ireland during the last 150 years".
In some respects, this story certainly has an extraordinarily happy ending. "In 1994," Dr Kennedy told us, "Ireland had the lowest maternal mortality in the world, with no deaths of women in childbirth in that year." The way family and nation intersected in the early years of independence was brilliantly captured in a description, from a 1934 edition of Model Housekeeping magazine, of Frank Aiken's wedding cake: it "weighed 110 lbs, stood 5 ft high and was artistically decorated with celtic interlacing in green and orange. Swords and crossguns, tiny green-clad soldiers and musical instruments . . . were some of the interesting features."
For an academic-type, Kennedy has a grand (if slightly passivevoiced) turn of phrase, concluding: "The Family has been examined and a coat of many colours and changing styles has been observed, torn and patched in parts, but still a source of comfort and shelter."
A measure of the sort of week we've had in Ireland is that we've found light relief in an international crisis, the precipitous decline of the world's second most powerful Bill (bet he wishes now he'd gone into software instead of politics).
The US President's defenders have been most (unintentionally) hilarious, especially those who insist - with precious little evidence - on how good he's been as a leader for Americans. But his critics can be very funny too. English journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, friend of every anti-Clinton conspiracy theorist, was Eamon Dunphy's much-admired guest on Friday's Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday.
Evans-Pritchard didn't audibly flinch when a righteous Dunphy suggested that Clinton was especially blame-worthy, because in his relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky the President was really "in loco parentis". With a 21-year-old psychology graduate? There's something loco there all right, but parentis it ain't.
