Radio Review: 'It was totally mind over matter, and muscle tone was going. And mental capacity was going. And it was really a struggle to keep going. To push yourself. Your body is saying no. Your mind is saying no. But you've got to do it."
Speaking on the latest episode of Body Parts (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday), which focused on the complex and lengthily-titled workings of the brain, journalist Grania Willis (of this parish and recently of the mountainous parish of Everest) could conceivably have been sounding the inner voice of the August radio schedule. In what was one of the few genuinely interesting pieces of radio this week, Willis's co-contributor Ian Robertson sounded, as he discussed the corrosive effects of stress on brain cells, as if he were describing the morning slump that has set in across the airwaves. Synapses firing sluggishly? Connections going unmade? Growth grinding to a halt? Too much glutamate is the culprit, according to Robinson.
They must be knee-deep in glutamate, then, in the studios of both Ryan Tubridy (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) and Orla Barry (Newstalk 106, Monday to Friday). There's a sharp difference between these two presenters: one of them (Tubridy) realises that things have gone from bad to worse, while the other (Barry) remains blissfully oblivious of just how patchy, rushed and patronising is the tone of the programme that bears her name.
Barry, on Tuesday, made a poor job of mediating discussions on two topics which should have yielded pacey and challenging radio: the question of integration and immigration in Irish society, and perceptions of the relationship between women's consumption of alcohol and rape. On the latter, in particular, Barry lacked any firmness of hand; a caller from the Rape Crisis Centre intervened not primarily to give an opinion, but to point out that the topic itself, as it was pitched, contained a dangerous and question-begging assumption. Is there a relationship between drunk women and the occurrence of rape? That, and not what the nature of that "relationship" was, ought to have been Barry's question.
Her reaction to the deeply unhelpful rambling of an elderly female caller of the "dressed-like-that-they're-endangering-themselves" school of thought, meanwhile, was less interrogative than indulgent. This is, of course, the more comfortable approach - Evelyn O'Rourke on Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) is prone, though less frequently, to lapses of the same order. There's a limit to the laziness of summer days, and beyond it lies irresponsibility.
Tubridy is not so much irresponsible as seemingly indifferent - now that his return to the grown-up side of the band comes across as an embarrassing mistake, at least in its present incarnation. He has the sound of a man who wishes that the words he is currently uttering were not his. If Tubridy could get a computer-generated voice box to do his talking for the rest of his programme's miserable run, you sense, he'd be first in the queue at Power City.
Although the slightly aloof tone he has now begun to adopt does him no favours (instead of refusing to look at the sinking ship on which he's stuck, he could make a stab at some intelligent conversation? He's done it before . . . ), the deep-running flaws of the programme are not Tubridy's doing. The threadbare appeal of his Young Fogey persona (increasingly an excuse for the duller-than-dull music) is only part of the problem. The production values are so cheap they are embarrassing. Guests are of shoddy calibre - the Australian journalist hauled on this week to discuss the life and loves of Rupert Murdoch seemed either to have forgotten everything he knew about the media magnate or never to have known it in the first place, as he audibly scrabbled through his notes in an attempt to answer the simplest of questions. Items are too short and scrappy to realise any potential they might have - a look at the 70th birthday of the Penguin Press on Wednesday was much-hyped and over in the time it takes to scan a book cover. And most cringe-inducing of all are Tubridy's constant pleas to listeners to comment on subjects that singularly fail to capture the imagination. Tubridy must truly be smarting for the days of The Full Irish and its network-encumbering supply of texts from eager listeners. The sooner autumn swings his way, the better.
Rattlebag (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday), meanwhile, featured an interview with Li-Young Lee, the Chinese-American poet who took part in April's Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway. There, reading his poems onstage, Lee came across as reticent, diffident, even difficult. He seemed a different man as he talked to Myles Dungan about the burden borne by him and his siblings as a result of what he called his parents' "tribal" acceptance of their grandfather's demands to have the children stay with him, despite the parents' knowledge of said grandparent's paedophilia. No questions asked. No truths told. Until now.