Dying for a Mother (BBC Radio 4, Friday) opens with the sounds of violence and the nasty, dehumanised banter of a loyalist gang in the midst of the 1981 hunger strikes. But wait - that's no loyalist gang, that's the RUC!
"Let's fire off a few baton rounds!"
"Wait, better give 'em a shout first so they can get some children to the front of the crowd!" "I don't like being hated this much." WPC Judith Wilson (Cara Kelly) is a sensitive soul all right, but she's not breaking the bantering mood of her colleagues with this remark, because Graham Reid's radio play very quickly leaves behind the outward show of the street and moves into an internal monologue: there's exposition to be done. Judith's back-story needs telling, because the play must move this young RUC woman from the Land Rover to a re-union with her birth mother (Stella McCusker), who is - wait for it - also the mother of a republican prisoner who's soon to join the hunger strike.
And that's some move. Yes, it's another loveacross-the-divide variation - Reid, however, is scarcely a hack, and his name as author demands attention in a way that a mere outline of this scenario does not.
Sure enough, within the schematic and sometimes cliched narrative - the familiar agony-of-making-first-contact-with-birth-mother/child is laid on as thick as the political dilemma - Reid has given us some strong, direct characterisations, particularly in the monologues. And most particularly in Cara Kelly's drily expressive incarnation as Judith:
"They say there are certain events and you always remember where you were when they happened, like the day President Kennedy was shot. I cried the day I discovered who my birth mother is.
It was the day Bobby Sands died, 5th of May, 1981. Finding out who my real mother is was a shock. So was the death of Bobby Sands. I wasn't on duty the day he died but I was on the day of his funeral. I looked at all those thousands of people and I thought, `How can we have shared this tiny little country for so long, and have known so little about each other?'
"Familiar enough sentiments, banal even. But in Kelly's mouth, wearily real: "Livin' in this place makes you paranoid." There's a bit of humour in those monologues too: when Judith and the birth-mammy, Yvonne, plan to meet, it's in a crowded restaurant that turns out to be full of women on their own. "Everybody seems to be lookin' at everybody else," Judith muses. "Maybe this is where people in our position always meet: the Adoption Cafe. One, two, three, four - goodness . . . All right, WPC Wilson, take a look around, take your time. You've waited 29 years for this. Take a careful look at each of the contestants and then it's down to you. You've been dyin' for a mother, so you can pick any one of these four."
Being a cop, Judith knows more about Yvonne than she can let on, and of course she can reveal little about herself. Their meeting is the one really fine piece of dialogue in the play, and their conversation is interspersed quite brilliantly with each woman's private thoughts - five minutes of real radio magic in a production that's otherwise a little aurally flat. From there Dying for a Mother winds down intelligently, plausibly (including another toe-curlingly sectarian outburst from a RUC man), never getting facile or straying into melodrama but even ending on a note of cautious optimism.
When someone of Reid's experience as a writer offers a radio play, it's hard not to wonder if it's really an unwanted stage or screenplay adapted for this medium. On the face of it Dying for a Mother is hardly immune to this suggestion; nonetheless at times it wears its radio vestments so proudly and boldly that there's no mistaking a unique sensibility.
Oscar Wilde's plays, on the other hand, have been proudly and boldly strutting their stuff on the nation's stages for so long that those origins are unmistakable. Salome (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday) in particular, has seen one striking production, Steven Berkoff's, imprinted on the visual memories of Gate-goers on several occasions over the last decade or so.
I suppose that drama must inevitably play a major part in RTE Radio 1's commendable Wilde centenary season, but couldn't we have lived without this one? Is there some mission here, to reclaim Wilde's language in this play from its recent Berkoffing? Sorry, mission failure: as presented here Salome is portentous to the point of being unlistenable. Spare me, please. Could we not, instead, have heard some of Wilde's newly published letters?
Anyway, these Wilde weeks - which include the devastating De Profundis in nightly doses - are really getting going from tomorrow, with more plays, children's stories, lectures etc. Quibbles aside, it constitutes a reasonable definition of public-service broadcasting.
Global (BBC Radio 5 Live, Saturday) offered another entry to that dictionary definition. It all started on a Spanish-language station in San Antonio, Texas, when a listener phoned in a dedication to a friend who'd just been picked up and shipped back to Mexico by the border patrol. Pretty soon, people were phoning in to say that the border guards, known as the green limes, had been seen at such-and-such a place at a certain time, e.g. heading west - and the station began to put these "alerts" out on air. Now they're a mainstay of its programming.
As we heard in an interview with a presenter from the station, there's rather more theatre than genuine defiance in this gesture. The observations are only passed on to listeners a few minutes, at least, after they are made; and the green limes themselves say they enjoy the "service", which would only really interfere with their work if the alerts said where they were going next, not where they were had last been seen.
Nonetheless, it was interesting to hear that what's often described as a ritual dance involving migrants and patrols has this radio accompaniment. And if it all sounds like making light of a tragic situation - well, it is, but that's what people do.
As the Mexican-American presenter said about that first dedication that started the process: "The guy was gonna be back the next day anyway."
Uaneen Fitzsimons, in addition to being one of the reasons that night-time musical radio has been so good in recent years, was one of those presenters who gave the much-abused term "personality" a good name. Credible, knowledgable, upbeat and charming, with a definite streak of divilment, she surely had a substantial future in 2FM, RTE television and beyond. Her loss from the world of broadcasting to the terrible ranks of road fatalities is quite simply devastating.