Radio Review/Harry Browne: With all due respect to all other sports and all other programming, baseball is where radio came into its own.
The game dominated the American imagination before the medium did, but radio made the game its own, this game that can be so clearly and perfectly described in the steady interplay of words and numbers, this game where the ball cracks against the bat and thumps into the mitt, and the umpire's bellowed calls rise above the noise of the crowd. (This game with a predictable number of built-in ad breaks.) Baseball fans know the names of long gone radio commentators; some of us even own LPs and tapes and CDs of great moments as heard on radio.
Baseball is where I, personally, came in to radio: I learned to negotiate the AM dial while my beloved New York Mets negotiated awkward road trips. But I also knew my Mets were latecomers, a TV-era team formed in 1962, and the Yankees would always have something over us with their black-and-white newsreels and their radio archive, chunks of it periodically given away to fans in little plastic 45s that came free with a programme or yearbook.
The immortal Yankee team of the late 1920s met radio on its arrival. When the team's slugger, Babe Ruth, promised a sick child he'd hit a home run for him, the image that lived through the ages was not of the homer itself, but of the kid smiling weakly in his hospital bed, the big vacuum-tube wireless beside him relaying the moment live, described like a million others: "It's going, it's going, it's gone! A home run!"
Non-Americans (unAmericans?) often mock the way the US "national pastime" has a "World Series". But the one that starts this weekend will probably have as many radio listeners in Spanish - especially in the Caribbean and Central American countries where so many players originate - as in English. When, midweek on Sport on Five (BBC Radio 5 Live, nightly), I heard a couple of chatsters enthusing in oh-so-American vernacular about the imminent possibility of a Boston v Chicago World Series, I reckoned I must be having a bad dream: such a match-up has been well-nigh inconceivable since before radio was invented. By Thursday morning, after an overnight of updates on Chicago's eventual defeat by the Florida Marlins on Up All Night (BBC Radio 5 Live, nightly) that ended with Chicagoans muttering the usual about "next year", I knew the world was all right and I felt nine years old again.
I occasionally think of nine years as a long time to be writing reviews of radio shows. Then I hear Letter from America (BBC Radio 4, Friday), where Alistair Cooke is pushing on for six decades in the gig, the world's longest-running speech radio programme, and I reckon maybe there's something to be said for commitment. It's not that, at 90something, Cooke's analysis of US events is wildly striking - even at a spritely 75 he was a pretty conventional thinker - but he has a store of odd stories to slip into the mix. Last week he was discussing multicultural California in the context of Herr Schwarzenegger's victory, and he recalled, back across most of a century, a time when "my mentor", HL Mencken, was denounced as a "bigot", a "fascist", a "racist" by speakers at an NAACP convention. Mencken's crime was referring in print to the blacks of Baltimore as "African-American".
Cooke didn't over-whinge, quite, about the change in acceptable terminology. He simply did what comes naturally: took the long view.
I wish Carl Corcoran were doing what comes naturally, playing great music and talking about it with loving intelligence, as he's done so often on Lyric FM. In for a week on Risin' Time (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) he sounded okay but out of sorts with the playlist and the format. This was most obvious when he sleepily attempted to replicate Maxi's run through the top tabloid stories, without, shall we say, her natural interest in the material. So, for example, when he told us about the top-grossing film in the US, he called it "King Bill". Twice.
Still, there's no denying the variety offered by live programmes on Radio 1. That same afternoon, just before Myles Dungan shared his odd whinnying giggle (rather endearing really) with the luvvies at the Gate for the theatre's anniversary on Rattlebag (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), Joe Duffy was continuing his fine-tooth-combing of the logistics of children being exported for adoption in decades past on Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday). This has been a model running story, new links in the sickening chain unearthed daily. Let's hope the same effort will soon be expended on a 21st-century human-interest scandal - surely there's at least one out there.