Ok, we know - courtesy of the clichΘ - that there's no such thing as bad publicity. But is the clichΘ's logical corollary that there's no such thing as too much publicity? Toby Young's ugly experience as a New York celeb-sucking journalist at Vanity Fair should have made him wary of the very Upper-East-Side assertion that nothing succeeds like excess.
Nonetheless, there he was, spending what sounded like far too much time on Tuesday's Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday), all in an effort to promote his new book.
Take any given listener - even, for the sake of argument, one who shares Eamon Dunphy's fascination with insider tales of the media.
Better yet, take me. Here I am, listening to Dunphy start the interview with Young. My interest is piqued by Eamon's extravagant-even-for-Dunphy praise for the book; I like the sound of Young, master of the very English art of self-deprecating arrogance; I smilingly envy him the good fortune of having an autobiographical tale that justifies snatching one of the all-time great book titles-in-waiting off the shelf: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.
Half-an-hour and more later, I'm sated. It's been great, Toby - I love your description of Vanity Fair as "the in-flight magazine of the Gulfstream-jet-owning classes". I love what happened after you offended an actor with your questions: your editor bawled you out with "You can't ask a Hollywood star if he's Jewish and if he's gay! Just assume they're all Jewish and they're all gay!" I even love the way you caused Eamon to tell us what other gossipy books he's been reading lately.
But your book, Toby? Why bother? I've just had its entire trajectory carefully charted for me and heard its best anecdotes.
What would I be doing buying your book? Your best hope is that someone who couldn't give a damn about this stuff switched off the interview after two minutes - but made a mental note to pick up the book as a Christmas gift for some pathetic media junkie.
Regular readers of this column will recognise "pathetic media junkie" as a term of endearment, unlike some of the terms that appeared here last week about Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday).
I was giving out about Ryan's military enthusiasms, which alternate post- pubescently with his gynaecological interests. But the boy's boyishness done good this week when he got an expert on-air to speculate about the New York air crash.
Science journalist Gerry Burns, with Ryan's capable assistance, went into far more detail than you might have thought feasible in explaining the history of troubles with the GE engine that was on the Airbus 300.
Their discussion was technical, but also clear and comprehensible, and implied a suggestion of corporate malpractice (though that subject tends to be a bit beyond the boy).
Ryan also had a laugh this week at the armchair generals (himself included) who had hemmed and hawed on Monday about the improbability of the Northern Alliance strolling into Kabul.
The week's events did come as something of a surprise to the pundits who have made much of the Taliban's likely fierce and suicidal resistance, complete with images of the Victorian and Soviet dead.
You never read that Afghan-apocalyptic stuff in this column, amid my anti-war rants. I'm no expert, but I've kept in mind that: (1) the number of Soviet dead was relatively small, and that damage was inflicted by a force with massive US support; (2) the Taliban was never a government worthy of the name anyway, as the most knowledgeable of the major Western journalists, the BBC's John Simpson, was telling us in September - long before he told Tuesday's Today (BBC Radio 4, Monday to Friday) how he'd personally liberated Kabul; and (3) infinite technological superiority always counts for something in war.
None of that guarantees that the Taliban won't pose military problems in the future. But it does, as a matter of fact, raise new questions about the cowardly US campaign of overkill, its fatal closing of the humanitarian window of opportunity over the last two months and its devotion, after a few stutters, to the creation of a blood-splattered corridor for the entry of one odious force to replace another.
Just because this part of the "war" turned out to be easy for the US doesn't mean that it was right, though that was the logical fallacy running through the week's crowing comments from the likes of Alan Ruddock on Wednesday's Last Word. Ruddock also continued to suggest that his pro-war stance and that of the Sunday Independent has constituted some courageous act of resistance against the anti-American Taliban in the Irish media. Go figure.
I'm sure the Taliban wouldn't welcome Sheila O'Callaghan, but I reckon she's one of the most fetching additions to the Irish media scene in recent years. Through her documentary work, she has given us a sense of her discovery of Ireland, from where her parents emigrated to England. Her new series, Country Living (RT╔ Radio 1, Wednesday) sees her setting off from Dublin in search of the rural Ireland that's at the heart of her romantic dream.
It is genuinely a romantic dream: O'Callaghan is no cynic or satirist, and this series, on the evidence of the first programme, is an atmospheric, authentic and innocent exploration of whether this young woman could possibly find a life for herself down the country.
The quest begins at an estate agent's window in Wexford. O'Callaghan pops inside and meets agent Adrian, and the sales pitch begins in distinctly North-American tones: "Thatched we have, thatched is no problem, we can do thatched. The problem is we can't do thatched inside your budget." Adrian turns out to be a transplanted Canadian who is already living the dream. "What it's all about is lifestyle . . . I wake up laughing every day." Adrian sometimes sees seals in Wexford Harbour. Seals! Presumably inspired in part by the radio microphone, Adrian immediately drives off with O'Callaghan to show her Rectory Hall and Fuchsia Cottage, un-thatched and in her price range.
The Rectory Hall house turns out to be unthatched and un-anything-elsed. It's a site, but Adrian happily walks O'Callaghan through the dockweed to illustrate the would-be position of the various rooms. "I have to say, Adrian, it puts me off a bit that I can't actually see the house . . . The next house actually exists, does it?"
It's possibly more off-putting that O'Callaghan intended to hear these Ontario and Brummie accents discussing the reality and potential of life in Wexford. And the accent cavalcade continues when she visits her real dream-house, sadly already occupied, in Carlow. There we hear the wellies and barking dogs and crying ewes and a suspiciously sentimental farm-woman with a very un-Carlow accent who, says Sheila, "has been living there for over 20 years". Indeed. But then what sensible Carlow Gael would actually live in a 500-year-old thatched farm house?
Even more extraordinary than the insistent mismatch of place and accent (what would Donncha ╙ D·laing say?) is the amazing notion that on Radio ╔ireann you'd be explaining what rural life is like, spelling out how you wean lambs and mix the barley into their feed. Could it be that we're not all born with that knowledge?
Then O'Callaghan proceeds to visit an Artane family who have just transplanted themselves to Cavan (damn accents again). They're thoroughly modern, with Daddy commuting off-peak to Dublin; they even house-hunted with the help of the Internet.
And what was their punch-line about the glories of their new lakeside life? "Bernard went for curry the other night at 1 a.m. and he was back within 20 minutes."
hbrowne@irish-times.ie