The sound of huffing and puffins

ACCORDING TO an epigram variously attributed to Elvis Costello and Frank Zappa, writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Aside from its implied low opinion of music journalists, the quote neatly captures the challenge – or futility – of using words to convey the essence of another, more abstract medium. It is not a problem confined to rock criticism, however. Radio documentaries that tackle essentially visual subjects face a similar dilemma.

Skelligs Calling

(RTÉ Radio 1, Monday) was a case in point. Written and presented by Luke Clancy, the documentary was ostensibly a portrait of Skellig Michael, the forbidding island off the Kerry coast. For centuries a home to early Christian monks, the inhospitable outcrop has become a destination for daring tourists, lured by its monastic ruins and vertiginous setting. As these attractions are basically visual in nature, attempting an aural representation of Skellig Michael seemed foolhardy.

So it is a credit to Clancy and his coproducer Kevin Brew that their documentary overcame this obstacle, viewing – or rather hearing – the island imaginatively. Although the programme featured historical background and personal reminiscence from various contributors, it focused on the renowned wildlife sound recorder Chris Watson as he made his way to the island’s summit, taping the ambient noise he encountered along the way.

The resulting sounds, from burbling ocean currents and whistling winds to Watson’s breathlessness and, above all, the cacophonous squawks of the vast seabird colony, evoked the isle’s wild isolation. Beside these recordings, the documentary’s other elements sometimes seemed superfluous. Clancy’s voice-over veered into the self-consciously flowery, as when he described the monks’ practice of leaving their boats at the mercy of the currents as “a peregrinatio that brought them ever closer to their God”. Even Watson attempted his own architectural choreography, referring to the “motorbike droning sound” of the island’s puffins: as his recordings attested, no words could do justice to the noise of their massed caws.

By the end of the programme, one understood why the monks saw Skellig Michael as the edge of the Christian world. The island’s startling natural soundscape, Clancy said, kept “ajar a door into the past”, allowing us to share, aurally at least, the ascetic monastic experience. Skelligs Calling was a captivating ocean of sound, best enjoyed by giving way to its sonic currents, in much the same way as the monks once surrendered themselves to the sea.

As an exercise in depicting the inherently visual on radio, Doreen: Telling the Dancer from the Dance(Lyric FM, Friday) seemed even more ambitious, dealing as it did with an art form based on abstract physical movement. But Deirdre Mulrooney's documentary was not concerned with the abstractions of dance. Instead, it uncovered an overlooked aspect of early 20th-century Irish culture, namely WB Yeats's fascination with the form, which led to his founding the Abbey Theatre Ballets in 1927.

Built around interviews with the late Doreen Cuthbert, who danced with the Abbey’s ballet company under its famed choreographer Ninette de Valois, the programme provided an intriguing glimpse of Yeats’s attempts at avant-garde projects at a time when a censorious conservatism was enveloping the nascent Irish Free State. Cuthbert’s reminiscences were charming but genteel; the real drama was provided by Yeats, with his late-blooming sexual liberation explored in detail. The buttery narration by Pat Laffan pitched the poet as a “ribald iconoclast” who saw dance as a manifestation of his belief that “truth cannot be known, only embodied”.

The material stretched thin at times. More than once, the narrator wondered how Ireland would have turned out had Yeats’s libidinous ideas displaced its “repressive” ethos, a notion dismissed as “ahistorical and utterly unlikely” by his biographer Roy Foster. Nonetheless, it was a valuable and enlightening piece, fleshing out Yeats’s contradictory character as well as reminding us how even the most austere eras harboured pockets of creative expression.

Broadcasting from Port-au-Prince on Wednesday's The Right Hook(Newstalk, weekdays), George Hook highlighted the scale of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which killed 250,000 people and left another million homeless. Hook was in Haiti to support the rebuilding efforts of the Irish charity Haven (of which Newstalk owner Denis O'Brien is a board member), though he jokily admitted his role was more "motivational" than practical. "Old George is not your natural-born brickie," he told Eddie Hobbs, his cohost, who was anchoring the programme from the Newstalk studio in Dublin.

But while Hook was touched by Haiti’s awful state, he was less charitable about the plight of our European neighbours. Egged on by the colourful editorialising of Hobbs, Hook berated Greece’s handling of the debt crisis, describing the Greek government as “parasites”.

“Can we cut ourselves loose from these wasters?” he thundered. Philanthropic endeavour had clearly done little to ease his default splenetic setting. Beside such rants, the drone of puffins seems like sweet relief.

radioreview@irishtimes.com

Radio moment of the week

Even given his nose for controversy, Eamon Dunphy's abrupt exit from The Dunphy Show(Newstalk, Sundays) was spectacular. After referring to Sam Smyth's sacking from his show on Today FM – owned, like Newstalk, by Denis O'Brien, whose business deals Smyth had covered – Dunphy went on a valedictory tirade. His life was "impossible" on Newstalk, he said. "That's why I'm leaving," he said. "Not just for me but for my producer, who's a young journalist, and for other young journalists in this station. They're being intimidated and blackguarded." Newstalk later contested this, but for O'Brien's stations to lose one Sunday host is unfortunate...