The problem for the chat shows, with the major news event of last week, was how to enlarge on the story, when the facts of the case were all too stark and were covered in the news bulletins in a couple of sentences. Here there was no room for studio discussion or counter-argument, yet the programmes - and apparently the public - required that the death of Diana be talked about, and talked about, and talked about. This is part of a healing process after loss, Maureen Gaffney pointed out on the Gay Byrne Show when it returned to RTE Radio 1 on Wednesday but by then the subject was reaching saturation point.
On Monday and Tuesday, programme after programme sought people to talk to about the tragedy. The airwaves were humming with experts, journalists, friends of relatives, more journalists, relatives of friends. There was more inter-journalist conversation in the days immediately following the accident than at any annual conference of the NUJ. Some of the more memorable contributors to the buzz were an angry Bob Geldof, more than willing to talk about media harassment on Today With Pat Kenny; Joe Duffy, on Daily Record, spoke with the priest from Diana's mother's parish; Brenda Donoghue on Network 2 had a report from Harrods which was, amazingly, open for business, though the front doors were tied with a black ribbon and a message, the contributor thought, in Hebrew (well, it's possible).
On Radio Ireland, Eamon Dunphy's Last Word went to Kevin Myers, who has presented the show in the past, and to whom Diana was "the greatest icon of the latter half of the 20th century". The word "icon" was, like "outpourings of grief", still fresh at that stage. "The eyes have it," he said. "We all became addicted to those eyes and she became addicted to the use of the eyes . . . The world could not get enough of those eyes."
THE calming and reflective tone of Seamus Heaney's voice, reading from his work, was a welcome respite from the hyperbole of the chat shows. The Darkness Echoing, "a weekly look at poets and poetry" began on Tuesday evening with Mary O'Donnell speaking to the Nobel Prize-winner. The link conversation pieces were, of necessity, contrived to steer the subject in the direction of the next reading but still the programme - even to one who had his poetic licence revoked by the Christian Brothers - was a pleasure. The series title is taken from Seamus Heaney's Personal Helicon:
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slyme,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity, I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Some of the more interesting programmes, on radio as on television, are to be found at inconvenient hours. Unless you are on hand, or have somebody else to set a tape going, you can miss these gems. I have only once seen an "audio machine", sound's equivalent to the VCR, brought back from the Indies or some such foreign part by a sailing enthusiast and used by him to catch the weather forecast when he was busy splicing halyards or whipping bitter ends. You can make your own rather crude version by plugging a radio/tape recorder into a timer socket, such as are used to turn on lights on winter evenings. It's not very accurate but if you allow a wide enough margin of error, you can catch your programme.
One programme, caught unintentionally in this way was Mad Fans, RTE Radio 1, 9.30 p.m., a new series with Derek Mooney of Wild On One fame. The subject was a Beatle fan who had loved and transformed a yellow beetle car into his idols' yellow submarine. Alas, when he eventually parted with the love object, the uncaring new owner turned it back into a car and broke his heart. And I would have missed it if I hadn't set my audio.
Last week, I erroneously included Gareth O'Callaghan among the RTE stars, who were returning for the autumn season when, in fact, he had manned the micro- phone all summer long. His show is called Upbeat, a title with pop music connotations which caused me to avoid it. In the autumn schedule it now shares the 11.02 a.m. slot with the Gay Byrne Show on RTE Radio 1 - Upbeat on Monday and Tuesday and the GB Show on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
