Radio Review/Harry Browne: There they were, Hope and History, set yet again on a fateful collision course. Yet again the venue was Belfast, and yet again Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) wasn't going to miss a single thrilling beat of the poetically pulsating action.
On Tuesday morning Áine Lawlor hyperventilatingly interviewed many of the key instruments of the North's peace; Tommie Gorman informed us that poor Áine had only had four hours sleep and excitedly briefed us on the shurely-shome-shignificance arrival of Joe Cahill at Hillsborough Castle. And yet somehow, despite all that encouragement, Hope and History lost their bearings - a waiting world was left to cope with an anticlimactic end to a hyped-up two-day process that we scarcely understood in the first place.
You can't really blame-the-meedya, of course - they were largely, if too uncritically, relaying the urgency of Ahern and especially Blair, who had set aside this time to work something out without breaking his stride toward war. The spin was for the benefit of the participants as much as for the media, but it proved a spin too far. Morning Ireland's fault was in allowing itself to get so suddenly, breathlessly spun.
I'm more inclined to blame the media when it comes to the mangling of science topics, in spite of the journalistic tendency to lacerate scientists for jargon and "gobbledygook". This was up for discussion on Marian Finucane (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), where the presenter started the programme by having a slagging crack at a pair of Leeds physics undergrads who tried to come up with a formula for calculating the ideal arm-velocity for pancake-flipping (it being the appropriate Tuesday). She read quickly through an account of their research and managed to render it nonsensical, with errors either of her own making (sticking two decimal points in the value of pi) or perhaps in the press report she was citing (referring to the non-existent "speed of gravity").
A few minutes later she was introducing three science PhD students who took part this week in UCD's Merville Lay Seminars. By way of a contest, each of them got two generously-timed minutes to dash through the basics of their research in "plain English", without baffling a "panel" of two of Ireland's plain people.
There's nothing wrong with this in principle; in practice, the young scientists who came on air described work in familiar, health-related fields (cardiovascular surgery, detection of breast tumours, drug therapies) that even the layest of lay people hear and read about on a virtually daily basis. It's a limited vision of science - reflecting the fact that the seminars are organised by departments of biochemistry, chemistry and pharmacology. There are more things in heaven and earth, Marian.
At the risk of being accused of fiddling while Rome burns, Radio 1 aired a new documentary, Fiddler's Frenzy (Wednesday), a bilingual exploration of Ireland's fiddles and fiddle players by Aoife Nic Cormaic.
This column's gaeilge is shamefully scant (sorry, RnaG, Raidió na Life and various Irish-language programmes elsewhere), but I do love the sound of Máiread Ní Mhaonaigh laughing over her instrument in dulcet Donegal tones. Even better is the sweet, screaming scrape of the Irish fiddle itself, much in evidence here. The shape of the apparatus, we heard from the experts, has scarcely changed since its invention in Italy in the 1550s. The wood in Irish fiddles rarely survives the long years in our damp climate; however, an Italian violin that's in its fifth century of making music is periodically taken out and played at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington - it needs the regular vibration to prevent it from falling apart. That's certainly among the happier exemplars of the dictum, "use it or lose it".
Sometimes, though, you can use it and lose it anyway. That's what is happening to the hugely popular "local" commercial stations that dominate the US marketplace. Tens of millions of people tune into local stations owned by the mega-corporation Clear Channel every day, but every day those stations become less and less local.
Forget about a local fiddler - even your favourite local pop band won't get playlisted until it breaks into the unbreakable national charts. And now, increasingly, Clear Channel is using a deceptive practice called "voice-tracking" - dropping a few shrewdly pre-recorded local references into a live DJ's patter that is, in fact, being broadcast coast-to-coast.
So US radio is simultaneously thriving and, if you listen closely, gasping for breath.