Shopping with the Scrooges

Radio Review:  Just when you think you've heard every possible angle on Christmas shopping - Pat Kenny's (Tuesday) producers come up with quite the daftest, albeit weirdly compelling, one.

It was, I imagine, supposed to be a sort of swop shop, where a socialite and a socialist get to walk in each other's shopping shoes for a day, so the posh-sounding Robert O'Byrne was sent to forage in charity shops while socialist Joe Higgins was despatched to Brown Thomas. It turned out that O'Byrne is a charity shop regular, who thinks nothing of bringing second-hand jigsaws as house gifts to his hosts, and was thrilled to have spotted a second-hand lady's beaded top that, while sounding perfectly hideous, was only €8, and would, he reckoned, make a great gift, bless him.

Meanwhile Higgins, who lit up the Dáil with his repartee, made Scrooge look like Donald Trump. Having had his pronunciation of Jimmy Choo corrected by O'Byrne, he mentioned some silver-patterned shoes he spotted at €640 with matching purse at €1,295. "The shoes alone would set a worker on minimum wage back two weeks' income without eating a bit," he said. The €5,000 Chanel handbag "would be three and a half months' income for a couple with one child on social welfare . . ." And on and on.

Everything from the price of the outsourced Waterford glass to the €200 pot of Crème de la Mer were mentioned in reference to social welfare payments, rapacious property developers - he laid into them several times - and globalisation. Higgins was so miserable he may be the only person in Ireland who would be delighted to get one of those bit-missing jigsaws in the slightly busted box from O'Byrne.

I HAVE BERATED Eamon Dunphy for lining up the usual suspects for his Conversations show (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday), but he can come up with some gems, notably this week's interview with comedian Tommy Tiernan. Liveline listeners heard all about Tiernan's new stand-up show and his Down Syndrome material, which greatly upset callers - most of whom hadn't actually heard the joke. "I do this material referencing people with Down Syndrome," he told Dunphy. "It's not my job to imagine things sensitively; it's my passion to imagine them ludicrously. I question why our society is so segregated."

He had invited the Liveline team and advocates of people with Down Syndrome to the Vicar Street show and said that the people who ought to be most offended - "if it is offensive" - told him afterward that they found the show funny and that he was actually doing good work. He hinted that the Liveline people, having seen the show, ultimately agreed that the whole thing had been stirred up unnecessarily.

A SUBJECT THAT went way beyond simple outrage and ill-informed controversy is RTÉ's by now infamous High Society TV programme, which stated that a politician had admitted taking cocaine but whose veracity was the subject of an Oireachtas committee meeting this week. The station held an internal enquiry into the matter and the chairperson of the RTÉ authority Mary Finan came into the Drivetime studio (Monday) to, well what exactly? Explain the report, or steamroll over Mary Wilson? As the findings of report are basically inexplicable - how can you still stand over a show but not over its source material? - Finan, who didn't get to the top of the PR tree for nothing, opted for the juggernaut approach. And unless the studio was having sound problems, the interview sounded pre-recorded - though that wasn't stated on what is a live show - something that tends to give the advantage to the interviewee and a thing that experienced media types regularly demand as it gives them more control.

Matt Cooper on The Last Word (Today FM, Tuesday) took up the subject with Simon Coveney, who was on the Oireachtas committee, saying that RTÉ's standing over the programme "took us by surprise in the committee" which had expected the station "to put its hands up". Cooper was much more of a match for Finan than Mary Wilson and, in what sounded like a live interview, he made her defence of RTÉ's investigation into the programme sound increasingly ludicrous. Less than a minute of the programme, Finan said, involved the claim regarding the politician, while "82 per cent" was from verifiable taped testimonies - as if the maths makes a difference.

Saying that RTÉ is happy to believe the assurances from the publisher of the book, High Society, earned her Cooper's best line of the day: "So you are outsourcing your reputation?" An impassable road block for any juggernaut.