RADIO REVIEW/Harry Browne: As disorienting as sunshine in an Irish summer, some of RTÉ Radio 1's seasonal shifting could give you jetlag without ever leaving the ground.
Take, for example, Maxi (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), whose voice should signal that you've still got some time to sleep before the 7 a.m. headlines shock you into proper consciousness. In these doggy days, however, she's residing in the afternoon where Ronan Collins should be - you know, not long after where Joe Duffy should be. And so a siesta, always a temptation anyway, turns into a deep-down physical longing centred somewhere in your inner ear, something you can measure in megahertz.
Her playlist doesn't do a lot for one's alertness either, lacking Ronan's thirst for the quirk. As for the show's competition, maybe I was dreaming but I was pretty sure I heard Maxi ask listeners to "complete this famous quote: 'you can't judge a book by its. . . '. One more time: 'you can't judge a book by its. . . .' " Judging solely by its playlist, you would probably say BBC Radio 2 shares a target demographic with Maxi, but the Beeb does like to give its middle-ageing audience the impression that it is being challenged and informed, rather than anaesthetised and patronised. Wednesday's evening-long Great British Music Debate (BBC Radio 2) was an ambitious mix of short documentaries that were slick-verging-on-oily, music that was poppy and familiar, plus live studio voices and listeners' e-mails to provide a sense of "national event".
The subject was essentially the music industry, with all its alleged aesthetic, technological and financial troubles. These were explored with some detail and sophistication, even if the top-heavy studio panel of record-company execs and others meant that criticisms were ultimately blunted. You know the way every celeb who is interviewed in Hello has always just turned the corner after marital strife/substance problems/career torpor? That was the sort of reassuring impression we got here about the great music conglomerates - who, having only recently promoted bland bands and declared war on Internet file-sharing, are now prepared to join hands with fans and musicians in the interest of artistic integrity and technological progress.
The BBC recruited presenters of the calibre of Tom Robinson and Paul Gambaccini, who essentially supported that optimistic assessment. Robinson got in a short clip of 2-4-6-8 Motorway, then spoke about the way new technology linking artists and audiences could eventually short-circuit the real villains - the small-time pirates who manufacture counterfeit CDs and unlicensed collections from which musicians collect no royalties.
Gambaccini was harder-hitting about the huge monopolists, especially their tendency to blame-the-Internet for all their woes. "The industry was used to forcing technology on the consumer," he said, citing the relevant litany of unwanted changes. It was galling for the companies, he said, to see consumers turning the table ("payback time" was one e-mailer's pointed assessment). Noting that via the Internet "the sharing itself is part of the the music-consumption experience", Gambaccini wryly commented "it is never good business practice to declare your core audience your enemy". Still, they've all got better apparently. Gambaccini offered a bizarrely upbeat assessment of the future of US music radio (which, we heard, is at a 27-year low for listenership).
Throughout the evening a rosy model of sensible industrial evolution emerged: let the Internet be the medium for singles, downloaded either for cash or as promotional give-aways; and, at least for now, keep luring in the customers with attractive and improved CD packages on which to hear whole albums.
Meanwhile, whatever your faith in corporate conversions, music continues to live and breathe: among the many useful statistics provided here was the one that musical-instrument sales are at an all-time high. And despite the fact that five companies dominate the world's record sales, they do so with diverse sounds: national musical cultures remain quite indomitable, well able to hold off Anglo-American hegemony.
One mega-corporation that you'd be forgiven for thinking would always be proud to market standardised, homogenised, pasteurised and ultimately bland products is Kraft. What under-50 suburbanite can fail to be cast back to childhood at a single (non-) taste of a Kraft "cheese-flavoured product", surely the late 20th-century's answer to Proust's madeleine? But it seems you can't judge a company by its cover: with a wary eye on the lawyers and a firm grasp of the market, Kraft is adjusting its brand positioning in the name of a war against "the global epidemic of obesity", as company spokeswoman Joanna Scott repeatedly described the enemy. That was on News at One (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), which like other media outlets regarded this cynical strategy as a major news item, and provided ample free promotional time for soon-to-be lower-fat treats.