Radio Review: Think of it as a sort of global warming. The media environment becomes dense with sulphuric effusions over a period of many months; broadcasters spend a long winter and early spring spewing hot air relentlessly across all frequencies, their competitive situation permitting them little regard for the more prudent marshalling of scarce resources, writes Harry Browne.
Then, bang, suddenly the ecological scales are tipped, and we've got Silly Season by the beginning of May.
Could it be that our media eco-system is changing for the long term, and that, as in the US post-OJ, if broadcasters aren't devoting all their energy to one overwhelmingly large story, they seem to have no real energy at all? Last week's desperate attempt to replace the imperial war against Iraq with the viral war against some foreign people's lung tissue as a media obsession ran out of steam with unseemly, almost catastrophic haste. (Perhaps the steam was laced with Legionella.) The sure sign that we've arrived ominously early into our annual summer lethargy is the sight, and sound, of Northern politics being dragged dispiritedly across our front pages and airwaves.
No, you won't hear me complaining too loudly about the vacuity of the present talk-radio scene. Not when that means we can hear the nasal tones of "pro-life" activist Justin Barrett without being struck with deadly fear about the imminent damage he's going to do to the nation's political life. On Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) - with Joe Duffy back, after a fortnight away, where he belongs, a-ha-ing at the Irish people - Barrett was brought on the line to discuss - wait for it - the new Guinness poster campaign, "The Miracle of Creation".
For those readers lucky enough to conduct their lives out of sight of bus shelters and billboard sites: it's sufficient to know that this tagline accompanies a close-up image of a pint filling up, and the suggestion is that a subliminal (or even fairly liminal) image can be seen in the swirling brown stuff. Barrett is in no doubt about what it is: "It's an unborn child" - none of your "embryo" talk for our Justin, nor for Joe, as it happens - "and quite an early one, five to six weeks". Although Duffy was with him on this one, Barrett had to admit that his wife couldn't see the "unborn child" in the poster. (God love her, doesn't she see enough of them - Barrett counted himself a fair old expert on embryonic physiognomy based on his day-to-day handling of such images.)
Liveline's likely hope that Barrett would do the outrage shtick for the programme was unfounded: he proved to be a fan of both Guinness and (even less surprisingly) the plastering of Ireland with pictures, or proto-pictures, of an embryo, even one that seems to be getting nourished with a mouthful of stout. As for "Miracle of Creation", well, he couldn't have put it better himself.
With Justin delighted and another caller annoying Joe by suggesting the swirling stout looked more like "the black hole" at the creation of the universe, Liveline's controversy was a bit of a non-starter, even by Silly Season standards.
This environment of radio nonsense all began to take shape - coincidentally, of course - when your regular radio reviewer slipped off to the US for 10 April days. Fiddling through leftover change this week, I saw one brassy little lightweight coin with a hole punched in it: the defunct New York City subway token. The demise of this metal marker of urban life, only now completely abandoned in favour of the plastic swipe card, was marked last Friday week by Irish-American Manhattan diarist John Farrell on The Gerry Ryan Show (2FM, Monday to Friday).
I have my doubts about this sort of five-minute scripted session on an otherwise live show, about the intrusion of writerly English into the talk-radio vernacular. However, Farrell's slot (which I hadn't heard in a while because it falls after this column's deadline) has evolved, on the evidence of his subway rhapsody, into a very lively affair indeed. On two or three occasions, he even erupted into seeming-spontaneous laughter, a sweet, low chortle reminiscent of the great New York DJ Vin Scelsa.
The content of Farrell's ode to the city's underground - its "great iron worms" - was romantic balderdash, laden with attractive autobiographical detail about its embodiment of the immigrant's American dream, about "the subway's invitation to participate and enjoy".
And this apparently being Silly Season, it was perfectly lovely. The subway, he said, "could take you anywhere you wanted to go, just like America herself - if you were only willing to jump on board". And as for the rats? "They're big, but they're not killers. At least on a one-to-one basis."