As the new year dawns, many people will feel a pang of sorrow as families go their separate ways after the festivities end. Others will doubtless be feeling positively exuberant. But whatever one thinks about spending the holidays with close relatives, few are foolhardy enough to do it in front of a microphone, as is the case on David O’Doherty and His Dad Do Jazz (RTÉ Radio 1, Christmas Day).
In fairness, as the title suggests, this one-off special could be broadcast any time of the year, but it’s very much a family affair. O’Doherty, best known for his whimsically skewed musical comedy, chats with his father, the pianist and composer Jim Doherty, about “his first love, apart from his family – jazz”.
What follows is an amiable shaggy dog of a show, covering everything from Jim’s early days juggling his entertainment career with a bank job – like his contemporary Terry Wogan – to the difficulty of explaining jazz. “Somebody who never plays a tune the same way once” is Jim’s absurdist definition.
But there’s no mistaking his devotion to the music. After he carefully describes why he loves George Shearing’s Lullaby of Birdland, you hear the tune with new ears when it’s subsequently played. Jim also explains the otherwise baffling disparity between his surname and that of his son, revealing that a manager took away the “O” from O’Doherty when billing his band. “This dogs my career,” David ruefully remarks.
TV guide: the best new shows to watch, starting tonight
‘It’s the first compliment I’ve got in 48 years.’ David O’Doherty and his dad’s familial jam isn’t overly sweet
First look at Meghan Markle’s new lifestyle show on Netflix
Missing You review: another hard-nosed lady cop with a scorched-earth personal life from Harlan Coben
Like so much great jazz, a spirit of improvisation runs through proceedings. The junior O’Doherty’s rambling questions occasionally elicit a tone of gentle paternal chiding, as well as anecdotes about the late guitarist Louis Stewart playing David’s 21st birthday.
Equally, detractors of jazz may suggest that, like the music they disdain, the programme doesn’t seem to make sense and doesn’t really go anywhere. But that’s to miss the point on both counts. It’s joyful, offbeat radio, perfect for any season, with just a hint of welcome tartness to prevent the familial jam becoming too sweet. “Thank you for asking those nice questions of me, son,” Jim concludes. “Yeah well, it’s the first compliment I’ve received in 48 years,” David replies. That’s families for you.
There’s a meandering air to In the Smoke (RTÉ Radio 1, Friday, December 27th-New Year’s Day), Doireann Ní Ghlacáin’s four-part series on the Irish emigrant experience. The programme has Ní Ghlacáin visiting Irish communities in various American cities (plus London) to discover how migration has shaped their identity. That’s the elevator pitch, anyway, with the presenter talking of the “essence of Irishness beyond our borders” in her introduction.
In practice the programme is a more loose-limbed affair, with personal stories told at their own pace, which also means proceedings can drift a bit. Ní Ghlacáin is a winningly convivial interlocutor – “wow” is a favourite interjection – but a few more probing questions might have yielded a thematically tighter programme.
The emigrant identity that emerges from the conversations is largely, and perhaps inevitably, based around traditional signifiers of Irishness: music, GAA, the Catholic Church. There’s surprisingly little about how Irish immigrants have assimilated into their host societies. It’s probably no coincidence that this subject is best articulated by the American-born father and daughter Bill and Mary O’Sullivan, from Chicago, who speak of cultural exchanges between other migrant communities in their city.
Ní Ghlacáin’s search for emigrant tales also leads her in some problematic directions. She speaks to Patrick Nee, a Connemara native who emigrated in the 1950s to south Boston, where he became a notorious mobster and IRA sympathiser. Nee, interviewed alongside his boxer cousin Sean Mannion, aka Rocky Ros Muc, is bracingly honest about his career – “I wanted to be a criminal” – but glides over the violence he was involved in. (“The shooting started.”)
As he talks about smuggling weapons to the IRA and receiving a lenient sentence for his failed gun-running on the fishing vessel Valhalla, there is no reference, from either Nee or Ní Ghlacáin, to the carnage such activities caused in the North, nor the murderous fallout from the abortive arms shipment. True, Nee’s testimony is anything but dull, and it’s candid in its own way, but to hear it nestling beside fondly nostalgic reminiscences by centenarian Blasket Islanders is disconcerting, to put it mildly. One can’t imagine an Ireland-based former criminal getting such an easy pass on national radio. Still, the segment rouses the listener from any holiday slumber: a smoke alarm, if you will.
The complex cultural dialogue of the diaspora is better exemplified by the legendary London-Irish folk-punks The Pogues, the subject of The Lyric Feature: A Dream of Foreign Lands (Lyric FM, Sunday, December 22nd). Mike Glennon’s documentary focuses on the band’s seminal second album, Rum Sodomy & the Lash, which marked their transition from interloping curios to paradigm-shifting phenomenon. Jem Finer, their banjoist, recalls the group’s mixed reception in Ireland at the time: “It wasn’t hostile. There might have been some confusion. There was definitely some enthusiasm. It certainly wasn’t like the entry of Christ into Jerusalem.”
The album also gave full expression to the late Shane MacGowan’s grimily poetic vision. The sad absence of the singer allows space for the reflections of other Pogues – Finer notes how his Jewish heritage sharpened his own outsider sensibility – but MacGowan’s compositions provide the spine of the narrative. “War, fighting, going away, leaving someone, dying, suffering: they are the overall themes of the album,” his sister, Siobhan MacGowan, laconically notes. It’s a vivid portrait of a vital band, but above all it makes one want to revisit the music.
A singer who shares MacGowan’s love of Irish music and empathy for the marginalised while maintaining his own distinctive voice, Damien Dempsey provides a rousing start to 2025 on the Louise Duffy Studio Sessions (RTÉ Radio 1, New Year’s Day). Dempsey performs his contemporary ballads in emotionally raw fashion, while discussing personal loss with big-hearted openness: “It’s hard not to blub,” he says after singing Love Is the Bomb, about his late father.
Fittingly, Dempsey finishes with a poignant version of A Rainy Night in Soho, MacGowan’s classic love letter to London. Much as Jim Doherty’s immersion in jazz brought colour to the grey Ireland of yore, so MacGowan’s songs of emigrant life changed Irish music, as Dempsey memorably attests. Cultural identity is rarely a straightforward matter.
Moment of the week
A welcome Twixmas jolt, Spill the Beans (RTÉ Radio 1, St Stephen’s Day) has Brian O’Connell chatting to habitués of Cork cafes about the joys of coffee culture and how that distinctive social milieu fits into an Ireland where the pub is losing its primacy. O’Connell adopts an enjoyably free-flowing format, with the background clatter of cups adding to the atmosphere, while hinting at broader themes: two interviewees are returned emigrants whose time in the United States encouraged their love of caffeine. A documentary that’s small in scale but invigorating, like a good espresso.
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Find The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Our In The News podcast is now published daily – Find the latest episode here
