Did you know that if you open many an ordinary teabag and spread the contents on the table you will find among them a very fine dust?
So says Stan Thekaekara, who comes from a tea-growing region in southern India and has every reason to know about these things. He also has every reason to condemn ordinary teabags: he told the dust story to a group of pensioners in a working-class Gloucester estate, in the course of a tea-tasting in which he was trying to sell them his own product.
He's a salesman, then? Well, partly. But one of the most appealing things about the six-part series Trading Places (BBC World Service, Tuesday), of which Stan is the sort-of star, is that it's hard to pin him down. Back in India he is a community worker; for his six-week stint in Gloucester he's part social-worker, part journalist, part guru, part marketing man. What he is selling, the "trade" of the series title, is more than tea: it's a link between his home place and this depressed English council estate, one that would see "fairly traded" tea from India arrive in Gloucester for a fraction of the price British consumers must usually pay; moreover, the residents of the high-unemployment estate could then bag, package and sell the tea at further benefit to themselves. Meanwhile, Stan learned and talked about life on an estate where "community" is even more fractured than in his own impoverished Indian home. And he heard about the indignity of people's struggles with the authorities to get the payments to which they are entitled.
These themes - the insight a foreigner can bring to a place, the behaviour of bureaucracies which are supposed to provide social services - should have been rife on Irish radio this week, in light of events in Dublin's Mount Street. But for all the sound and fury, only Wednesday's Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTE Radio 1) really delved into the subject, using the simplest method imaginable: Browne put himself among the people crowding outside the Refugee Application Office Wednesday morning, and for more than a half-hour of essentially "live" radio we experienced their frustration and confusion - and the official indifference toward their lives. Browne, audibly upset by people's distress, didn't pick up on a suggestion made by two different interviewees, an African who already has refugee status and an Estonian who's recently arrived and had spent most of the week fruitlessly camped in Mount Street: was the chaos engineered - or at least allowed to develop - by the Department of Justice, maybe as a means of "softening up" the Irish public for largescale deportations?
In a benign parallel universe, Chris Barry (98FM) might have followed up that question. In this ugly one, that same evening, he wondered aloud where these asylum-seekers got off being so demanding and aggressive - the question Browne was comprehensively answering elsewhere on the dial. "I'll be crucified by the print media for this," Barry cried. Well I'm out of nails, but really this was dreadful stuff, setting up the false xenophobic dichotomy between the treatment of "native" homeless and foreigners. To cap it, a Nigerian caller - who was trying to explain to Barry the way officialdom was holding up the new work permits for himself and many of his friends, a crucial insight given this week's publicity for the "15 out of 3,000" figure - was subjected to an interrogation about why he came here. Suddenly the call was cut off. "We didn't hang up," Barry said. "He did. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions."
At least Navan Man got it right. Despatched by The Last Word (Today FM) to look into the dodgy foreigners who were costing us a fortune and causing havoc on our streets, he camped outside the Merrion Hotel. The MTV Europe Awards, which started out looking like an opportunity for Smug Ireland to go into overdrive, turned out to be the kiss of life for the dying art of populist begrudgery. Callers to Barry, Liveline etc certainly socked it to the celebs, and while Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1) let promoter Louis Walsh away with the patent nonsense about one billion viewers worldwide watching the "ceremony" (hey, even The Irish Times trumpeted the patent nonsense about half that figure), at least journalist George Byrne was let on to snipe.
Some broadcasters took the begrudgery a little beyond populist bounds: Kevin Myers, hosting The Last Word, couldn't tell us often enough how he would rather have a gun to his head than attend the Point soiree, but I preferred those moans to another report from some hack who has tapped chambermaids for "information" on Whitney Houston's movements. And what I far preferred to both of them was Sweet Soul Radio 2 (BBC Radio 2, Wednesday): Rufus Thomas, revisiting 1969, played, back-to-back-to-back, the Delphonics's Didn't I Blow Your Mind (so beautifully used in Tarantino's Jackie Brown), Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions's This is My Country and Sly and the Family Stone's Everyday People. I think there's nothing on MTV to touch that. But like Sly says, "different strokes for different folks".
Gore Vidal in his screenwriting days might have penned that line for the galleyslave scene in Ben-Hur, but I doubt it. Still, he did - by his own account in the excellent repeated series about films and myths, Print the Legend (BBC World Service, Wednesday) - write tons of homosexuality into the relationship between Charlton "Chuck" Heston's Judah Ben-Hur and Stephen Boyd's Messala. One scene, the characters' crucial reunion, positively dripped with suggestion, and Vidal explained what he saw as the underlying motivation to director William Wyler. "Okay, tell Stephen about it before they do the scene," Wyler told Vidal. "But don't tell Chuck . . ."
He'd have crucified him.
Harry Browne can be contacted at: hbrowne@irish-times.ie