Do you want to take the Robert Fisk Tour of Sabra and Chatila? Sean O'Rourke did it, back in the quiet-for-Fisk days of August. The result went out as a Bank Holiday special, and Robert Fisk's Beirut (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday) was virtually an advert for this unique tour operator. That's not just a rhetorical flourish. Fisk told O'Rourke that he's not ex-directory. As a result, the relatively small category that is English-speaking tourists in Beirut is in the habit of ringing him for an informed look-round the Lebanese capital.
O'Rourke compiled and produced this exceptionally fine documentary, in which the subjects were both Fisk and the city.
The former's acquaintance with the latter actually pre-dates the civil war: Fisk came to beautiful Beirut on holiday way back when it was a place that tourists did visit in some numbers; he returned to the fracturing city a few years later and has stayed fairly constantly as a correspondent for the quarter-century since.
So he could help us soak up the atmosphere not only in the dismal refugee camp, where he reminisced about the bodies he saw on that terrible day in September, 1982, but in all sorts of other places, including the city's Jewish cemetery. Although he insisted the affection he feels for Beirut shouldn't be called "love", we certainly heard plenty of warmth being directed at him from its citizens.
It wasn't all politics, by any means; and what there was he presented through telling detail and anecdote, a bit like a good journalist. "The church here, which is the Maronite cathedral, has got these extraordinary loudspeakers on its bells - and the purpose is to make the largest ecclesiastical noise. But since then, the reconstituted and refurbished mosque behind me has put up speakers, so that they have the loudest Allah Akbar. So you can sit here on a Sunday or a Monday or a Friday and have your ears deafened by all these people bleating on to God from one place or another . . ."
We heard about the sea breezes, the traffic jams, the memories of clever disguises in the kidnapping days. We visited the bar in the new Commodore Hotel, where the vulgar decor is designed to appeal to visiting hacks: the carpeting looks like a series of newspaper front-pages, including, in a tip of the fez to urban twinning, the Belfast Telegraph.
And hey, there's more of a Northern Ireland vibe than that.
"Socially, the Lebanese have learned nothing from the war - nothing, they've learned nothing," Fisk said. "The system of administration is still sectarian: the president has got to be a Christian Maronite; the prime minister has got to be a Sunni Muslim . . ." At this cooler latitude, we call such a sectarian carve-up a "power-sharing executive" - and we're still congratulating ourselves on its subtlety.
The city still has an east-is-east, west-is-west hangover, too. "The Lebanese army has very clear positions all the way up what was the 'green line' in the centre of the city. Why? Just in case it becomes the green line again."
There were grim and more distant Fisk history lessons too: Crusaders once massacred every man, woman and child in Beirut. Children starved there during the first World War. The famed eye-patched Israeli general, Moshe Dayan, lost his eye not fighting Arabs, but to a Vichy-French sniper during the second World War. By and large, this was Fisk wearing his raccounteur hat, largely set aside since September 11th to make room for the thinking-cap.
Back in Belfast, Gerry Anderson would never be accused of being one of the great intellectuals of the broadcasting world. But he's a fine radio man and more than capable of being a good tourist, so the Beeb sent him to Cong to join the community as it marked the 50th anniversary of The Quiet Man. The resulting documentary, Reawakening the Quiet Man (BBC Radio 4, Friday), was the sort of wee taste of something Oirish that Radio 4 likes to give its audience every now and again.
This programme was hardly going to hear a word against John Ford's classic film, apart from some sharp carping and a few funny old moans from Irish Times Film Critic, Michael Dwyer. Anderson told how on first sight of the rushes from Ireland, the head of Republic Pictures ordered the cinematographer to stop shooting the movie through a green filter! Anderson seemed to be using something similar. Cong, he told us, has scarcely changed in 50 years - this dubious statement made on the basis that "you won't find a McDonald's or Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet here". Still, this had Andersonian warmth and some tongue-in-cheek nostalgia, a bit like The Quiet Man.
The moment or moments when a relationship starts dying is impossible to locate, but that doesn't stop people, and especially the imaginative stratum of people known as writers, from attempting the task all the time. Here's one of Edna O'Brien's efforts, as heard in her Mrs Reinhart (BBC Radio 4): "Once, in their country cottage, a cow had got caught in the barbed-wire fence, and both she and Mr Reinhart had had a time of it trying to release the creature. Afterward they had drunk champagne, intending to celebrate something. Or was it to hide something? Mr Reinhart had said they must not grow apart, and yet had quarrelled with her about the Common Market, and removed her glasses while she was reading a short story by Flaubert sitting up in bed. The beginning of the end, as she now knew." Mr Reinhart's "replacement" woman ("girl, really") is "so young that she shouted out of car windows and carried a big bright umbrella". Mrs Reinhart still cries over Mr Reinhart having made a fool of himself.
Mrs Reinhart is in immediately post-marital mode, escaping to a seaside resort and a little vulnerable to adventure, though scarcely of the Fisk-in-Beirut calibre. Packed with events, incidental metaphors, sex and violence and a character known only as "the Bounder", plus something resembling a happy ending, this was a great, easy listen.
There has been some less-than-easy listening lately for people who work around this place. Now, I don't take seriously everything Irish Independent journalists report about The Irish Times, even where they're repeating it on the national airwaves. But please don't call me paranoid if I see a worrying pattern: Vincent Browne steps up his radio involvement with a return to Tonight (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday to Thursday); Fintan O'Toole takes a week in The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) presenter's chair in the midst of the busy autumn season; Hugh Linehan shows his radio chops again by presenting the Sunday Supplement (Today FM). Do they know something I don't know?
Just in case: one care-worn and slightly soiled Irish Times journalist available for non-newspaper nixers, no reasonable offer ignored.
Write to: hbrowne@irish-times.ie