RADIO REVIEW/Harry Browne: So is the arrival of Tom McGurk as the new presenter of the Sunday Show (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday) an indication of a burlier, "manlier" programme? It could well be, notwithstanding the highly able double-X chromosomes behind the scenes, including the new Radio 1 boss, Eithne Hand, and even the studio presence last weekend of Kathryn Holmquist, who McGurk described as "the domestic conscience of The Irish Times".
Whatever. The new, improved Sunday Show certainly rumbles along with a bit of spirit, from the initial panellists' "worst story of the week" to a right narky row about the Middle East between Tom Cooney of UCD and Robert Fisk. Along the way there's a much more opinionated presenter, a little more reaching out from the studio to contributors and the vox populi in the great outdoors, but of course the same old Sunday Show voices and views of - dare I say it - Dublin 4.
Well, OK, it would be too abrupt for the conservative Radio 1 audience if the Sunday Show dropped the Great and Good, not to mention the Banal. The real wake-me-up came in the form of a couple of songs by Bob Dylan, introduced by McGurk with a certain élan and very uncertain accuracy as "the nostalgic east-coast conscience and billionaire troubadour". Whatever about Bob's geographic origins and precise net worth, it was cheeky of Tom and Co to end the programme's war talk with God on Our Side. On the oversized, slightly messy international panel that discussed Iraq, Cooney's support for the US was nearly as lonely as it was passionate. That it is to say, on this rare occasion we heard a conversation about the coming war among a group of people whose views were fairly proportionately representative of global and Irish opinion (their views were representative, although not their national origins or their gender). Actually, Cooney even strayed beyond the Bush-ite script by stressing that attacking Iraq is justifiable for the purpose of protecting Israel.
Thanks to the likes of Fisk and Tony Benn, rarely heard words such as "oil" and "empire" were on the Sunday Show agenda, and McGurk sounded happy enough to play with them. Vincent Browne agreed, and effectively reprised some of the programme on Wednesday's Tonight (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Thursday). And, in spite of Fisk's insistence that we should avoid talking of war as an "inevitability", there was nothing said on either side of the argument that would allow listeners to hope the US marines might not be murdering their way into Baghdad before the spring is out. As military expert Tom Clonan pointed out, Ireland is directly involved in the war effort.
"They're like little aliens who landed here. Every one of their senses is impaired." These blunt comments about autistic children in Paula Carroll's striking documentary, Living With Dara (Clare FM, Thursday, repeated tomorrow at 5 p.m.), are a far cry from the smiling talk of "difference" and even "blessings" with which we are rather more familiar. They set the tone for a straight-in-the-ears look at autism.
Six-year-old Dara Whelan of Scariff, Co Clare, is the noisy, unresponsive but affectionate child whose shouts and laughter complete a soundtrack of love, mystery, misery and frustration. "He looks normal," his father says "but he's not." Carroll effectively weaves the parents', grandparents' and brothers' voices in and out to capture the manic quality of the permanently abnormal life of the household. His mother lives the life of a jailer: "He spends 100 per cent of his time trying to escape". It's absolutely no joke - she matter-of-factly tells of how, having found no emergency respite care available, "the stress got to me and I collapsed here one afternoon, and I ended up in hospital with suspected meningitis. It transpired it was just pure physical, mental and emotional exhaustion". Such is this mother's evident suffering and vulnerability, and such is the effect on her family, that the question of whether this programme constitutes intrusion and exploitation inevitably arises. Producer Carroll effectively deflects the question by imbuing the documentary with campaigning zeal. The lack of care, information, funding, understanding: the State's failures are rendered vivid and horrifying in the presence of this serial personal tragedy, which includes a marital separation in its wake. As Dara's father says: "It's not something you discuss in a pre-marriage course." So what's going on with autism? The apparent change in the proportion of children with the condition - from one in 10,000, the figure the Whelans were given just three years ago when Dara got the label, to one in 100 - can hardly be explained simply by improved diagnosis. Living With Dara doesn't come up with any answers, but by brilliantly exploring the details of a family's bitter experience, it underlines the urgency of the question.