Radio Review: 'There are some men who thrive off selfish wives. I've seen it - they excel themselves in the face of adversity." "True enough, true enough. But there are others who suffer in silence, waiting only for death to rescue them. Maggie's husband, I fear, was of this latter mould."
John B. Keane - for it was he (and who else?) who penned these words - would have been 75 last Monday. Fred Rimble (BBC Radio 4, Monday) was a fitting tribute, a dramatisation of his typically earthy, comic short story about the impossibility of having a functional family life without resort to desperate fictions.
The Co Kerry publican/writer was a magnificent radio presence himself, and it was no bad thing that most of the characters here sounded like the man himself. This was especially true of the men populating the narrative's outer frame - the publican, the doctor and the priest - who regale a newcomer to their village with the intimate story of the neighbouring Conlons, in unmistakable Keane prose. As old Maggie puts it, in another context: "The devilment of the people you live on the same street with - you never guess who's gonna stab you in the back next."
The story, of a hypochondriac old wan who is repeatedly coaxed from her sick-bed by her son's tall tales of a far more unfortunate friend (the eponymous Fred), is just a vehicle for the author's real obsessions: sex, lies and the bit of property.
It's Keane's Ireland of the 1950s, which means the priest describes young Jim Conlon's girlfriend, Nice Nuala, as having "haunches on her like a young heifer"; Nuala herself refers rather breathlessly, hopefully, to "husbandly attentions"; and the mammy's sharpest curse is: "May he rot in the nether regions!"
Keane here was having (quite) a bit of fun. Nuala's other courtship consists of trips to the pictures with a Listowel small farmer, starting appropriately with Odd Man Out. Then there's Dumbo.
"Dumbo? With a small farmer?!" the priest exclaims worriedly.
When, fed up with his mother and his limited prospects, Nuala jilts Jim and heads out of his house forever, she is moved, in her final words to him, to remember another movie favourite: "You must see Gone With the Wind if you can, Jim."
Jim, in turn, is moved to cry out: "I've lost her! I've lost the only nice girl in the western world!" The sweet-sounding Ardal O'Hanlon as Jim was perhaps the biggest name in a cast that nonetheless rather dwarfed him in terms of audible talent. (Plus his most famous role haunted the story: no plan hatched by Father Dougal could possibly turn out to be clever.) Tina Kellegher and Doreen Keogh were terrific as, respectively, Nuala and Maggie, while the lads at the bar were an astonishing line-up altogether: Frank Kelly, Jim Norton, Pat Laffan and Don Wycherley. Kerry Lee Crabbe charmingly adapted Keane for radio-drama purposes.
Yank though he is, writer-actor-director Roger Gregg has proven he knows more than a little about radio drama, and has displayed parodic mastery of the Celtic canon. His new Crazy Dog Audio Theatre series, Beyond the Back of Beyond (RTÉ Radio 1, Thursday), is another six piss-takes on the nation's cultural heritage. The first show, The Banshee's Comb, brought some supernatural sound effects into Keane Kountry: a rural family, including an ex-Rose of Tralee, get drunk, sing and bicker about property and everything else, until the ghouls sort them out.
"I will be avenged!" cries one ghost.
"Avenged, for what?" a psychic investigator queries, to which the phantom growls: "Lies, betrayal, murder - Irish family issues."
Gregg is brave enough to try to entertain, and involve, a substantial audience "live" (even when they're playing the dead) in the studio. What with them, the music, the live effects, the allusions etc, most of the coherence and much of the entertainment for the radio audience was lost in the chaotic mix this week. Having sat in on the recording of two subsequent shows, I can say with some confidence that this series improves.
Irish homes of an ostensibly different sort were featured on Five Seven Live (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday). Fergus Sweeney - making good back home after his long London spell on BBC Radio 5 Live - was looking into the tax breaks that aid the owners of 150 historic Irish houses, and asking whether those owners (Michael O'Leary and Tony Ryan among them) live up to their obligations to make them occasionally accessible. We entered Liz MacManus's Victorian front room in Bray. Little visited by tourists, it features in a book annoyingly referred to by Sweeney and MacManus (twice) as "Portrait of An Artist" - in which Joyce struggled with "Irish family issues" without hope of a tax break but keeping track of his definite articles.