RADIO REVIEW/Harry Browne: It's never easy to make compelling drama out of such drab and alienating characters, people so obviously far removed from the concerns of ordinary people. As it was for broadcasters trying to fill hours with the vicissitudes of the election no-contest, so it was for the producers of The Frederica Quartet (BBC Radio 4, Monday to Friday), an ambitious and ongoing attempt to make radio drama out of some of A.S. Byatt's extremely novelistic fiction.
I would have thought most of Byatt's readers enjoy her work for the clinical precision of the writing, the analytical shape of the narrative, rather than any soapy devotion to her characters. In fact, I can't imagine anyone finding them likeable, though obviously they are of enough chilly interest to keep us reading.
My initial reaction, then, to hearing them brought to life as this radio epic got started, with The Virgin in the Garden, was an even stronger "yuck" than I might have anticipated.
As a reader, one quickly gets over the "nobody could possibly talk like that all the time" barrier; as a listener, it's not so easy, as a succession of voices either spout impossible pomposities, or have their words reduced to blunt instruments for advancing the plot. Sure, The Frederica Quartet should be given a fair chance, and I don't want to seem to reduce the possibilities of radio drama to a crass Hollywoodish need for likeable voices and someone for whom the audience can cheer. All the same, a daily drama in 15-minute chunks, a half-hour after the end of The Archers (BBC Radio 4, Monday to Friday), is going to need to do better than yuck, isn't it?
One amusing aspect of this week's literary radio was that the narrator-voice of Byatt's Frederica Potter sounded so much older than Margaret Atwood's Iris Chase, the very-elderly-indeed narrator of The Blind Assassin, who was unfolding her own chilly tale on The Book on One (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), with Sharon Hogan as the reader doing a decent Toronto accent.
It was some radio week all the same for contemporary women novelists. Fay Weldon's autobiography, Auto-Da-Fay, was Radio 4's Book of the Week (Monday to Friday), and she turned up too being interviewed by Myles Dungan on Wednesday's Rattlebag (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday). The interview was nothing like the torture that these writer-chats can be, with Dungan clearly of the opinion that this was one in which he could laugh, or at least snigger, at the least little amusing remark, his own included.
It was a good trick on both their parts to make this a laughfest, because the story of Weldon's early life has more than its share of the grim and miserable (as well as certain strong - and grim and miserable - resemblances to the story of Frederica Potter, as it happens). The most pertinent detail, perhaps, was when Weldon described how her parents' marriage broke up, with Fay herself only a young child, just after her father had been publicly demonised for his efforts as a socialist election candidate.
I'm so glad I didn't confine myself to radio when it came to the election debate this week; otherwise I would have missed the strange spectacle, as the opening statements began, of Michael Noonan apparently wearing an orange Michael-Noonan mask. (The single pink jowl hanging just behind it was the giveaway.) Once Noonan sat down the mask seemed to melt seamlessly back into his real face - without any cool Jim Carrey special effects - and as a TV event, the debate was dead.
AS A radio event - relayed live on Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Thursday) - it never got started, with neither of the main characters willing to indulge the mannerisms of semantics and tone which have made them living caricatures over the years. Noonan kept following the spin-doctor's advice that he should keep the pitch of his voice low and its pace measured; Bertie also stuck-by his handlers' ever-so-boring game plan of using actual words in actual sentences.
So what about the debate's actual content? It was hard to care, but it was on the following night that Vincent Browne identified what he seemed (or pretended) to regard as the "shocking" right-wing parameters of the debate, which spent 30 per cent of its duration on crime - "when essentially," Browne said provocatively, "we do not have a crime problem". There was no discussion, as he pointed out, of the causes of crime, and no discussion of the far more serious problem of road deaths.
Normally, I go along with Browne when it comes to crime.
In fact, I'd go further and say that much of the muttering we hear from over-30s about late-night "public-order" savagery is based on a healthy, envy-fuelled hatred of the very idea of young people with plenty of money. Remember in our day, when a proper evening on the tiles could be recalled, hazily, as a "rare ould night"? Now there's nothing rare about it. These wee feckers can have a rare night three or four times a week - and do they even make the best of it with an ould sing-song back at the flat? Not on your Nelly Furtado they don't. Anyway, we take some vicious comfort in the (wildly exaggerated) notion that these jumped-up gits are at least finishing the night out on the streets doing permanent damage to each other's internal organs, with more direct methods than the standard chemical intervention.
Yes, that would have been my agreeable Browne-to-Browne party piece on crime, if I'd been asked. But then Thursday morning rolled around, and the buses in a massive pizza-slice of Dublin failed to do so, all because some brats - probably without a lot of money in their pockets - chose to mess with a couple of buses; fed-up drivers understandably chose to take industrial action. And I began to wonder if perhaps we didn't have a crime problem.
Lest I descend, Noonan-like, to the politics of the latest atrocity, let me return to the more comfortable realm of the idiocy of the election arguments and of their radio coverage. On Monday evening and Tuesday morning you could nearly hear the relief in the studios: aahhh, polls - two of them! And what ho, there are "discrepancies" between them!
That word was thrown around with abandon, and never once in my hearing was it corrected. (Perhaps Pat Kenny did so out of my hearing, since his programme has taken some scattershot interest in explaining how opinion polls work.) There was a "difference" all right between the MRBI and IMS polls, and it's perfectly reasonable to wonder which more closely reflected people's actual preferences. But the differences fell well within the polls' margins of error, so "discrepancy" is hardly the appropriate word. Perhaps the broadcasters realise this, at some level, but the media culture forces them to repress the knowledge.
After all, if they admitted that shifts of 1 to 3 per cent in a party's opinion-poll support were essentially meaningless in statistical terms, what would they have left to report? In the absence of real politics, they've got to make a drama out of something.