VINNIE, we hardly knew ya. After a few months in which turning on the radio and tuning in 98FM became a new 10 p.m. reflex for man Dubliners, Vincent Browne Tonight is all too suddenly gone.

Barring some return in a new form or format, the programme looks set to join Scrap Saturday in radio heaven. Down here in purgatory, it will like that classic satirical show be remembered as being even better, more shocking, refreshing, different, than it actually was. If that is possible.

Vincent Browne Tonight was often carefully prepared and painstakingly produced the startling, high powered line ups of guests alone testify to hard, hard work. Browne's attention to detail was at full stretch in such programmes as his dissection of Bishop Brendan Comiskey's famous press conference, when Browne again and again played back crucial passages and teased out apparent contradictions.

But the show's overwhelming success probably owed more to the possibility of spontaneity, of genuinely frank speaking, of knockdown drag out arguments without the RTE constraints of time and good manners. It was often "free speech radio", as frequent guest Eamon Dunphy was wont to exclaim.

One memorable night Browne challenged Dr Moosajee Bhamjee's reputation for straight talking by asking him to give a "psychiatrist's opinion" of various Dail colleagues then burst into incredulous laughter when the Clare TD characterised the likes of Dick Spring and Michael McDowell as very nice people indeed.

There was often a sense that we were eavesdropping on "inside" talk. Better yet, the reality was that we could join in, courtesy of the show's phone lines. This programme was a landmark, a joining of the US talk radio form with the far more sophisticated Irish tradition of political conversation. More, more.

There may be precious little drama in RTE's current affairs output, but Kate Minogue's superb production of Arthur Millers' Death of a Salesman (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday) for a new evening play slot certainly helped to take up the slack.

In a play that has proved eminently suitable for the medium before, there was a bit of the old accent problem though Irish actors do seem to find New York among the easiest of US voices to imitate but much to praise. Notably there was the rich "sound space created by Aodhan O Dubhghaill to capture the mix of reality, fantasy and memory that the work comprises.

Daniel Reardon makes a heartbreaking, nothing left to sell Willy Loman, with the character's hope and loss evoked splendidly. Deirdre Monaghan has a more thankless task as his wife Linda, who gets to make all the big theme statements that send the Leaving Cert students scrambling for their notebooks.

Mark O'Regan plays Biff with a definite John Malkovich lisp and there's nothing wrong with a performance modelled on that. Michael Grennell breathlessly brings us Hap's "over developed sense of competition".

And the radio is a great place to some classic lines, as when (Des Nealon) sneers at obsession with being "well by citing millionaire J P Morgan. "In a Turkish bath he looked like a butcher, but with his pockets on he was very well liked."

Mary Mulvihil keeps making science sound so breezy and fun, so it's a shame tonight is the last programme in her smartly named latest magazine series, Up and Atom (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday). In keeping with scientific traditions of rigorous debate, I'm going to pick a bone not with Mulvihill herself, but with a guest on last week's show.

Mind you, elsewhere in the programme she discussed Stephen Jay Gould's latest book, so armed with Gouldian insight Mulvihill should have spotted the glaring fallacy in her chat with British boffin Heather Cooper. The latter talked through the interesting evidence of there being planets outside our solar system and the likelihood that some sort of life exists elsewhere. From there, guest and host slipped happily into the prospects of communicating with ET.

But wait. There's been life in this corner of the universe for nearly five billion years. After countless evolutionary twists and turns, there's only been a sapiens species for the last half million or so. And we've only been emitting intelligible radio waves for a few generations (and for how much longer?)

So the leap from "life" to "phone home" is a long, rather unlikely one a fact purveyors of popular science should at least acknowledge while we gaze hopefully at the stars.