Being in the right place at the night time
SOME broadcasters sound better at night. Lyric FM’s Paul Herriott, original host of Blue Of The Night, now resident presenter of The Lyric Concert, is one. His voice has a whispered, nocturnal quality. John Kelly is another, though he is confined to afternoons these days. The Northern Irishman has been off air for a couple of weeks, and The John Kelly Ensemble has sounded very different in his absence. Safer. More conservative.
The usual eclectic sounds of jazz pioneers such as Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders have been replaced with plenty of Brahms and Beethoven. It’s surprising in one way, insofar as the stand-in presenter is Bernard Clarke, who fronts Nova, the most determinedly avantgarde show on Irish radio; but it’s a good reminder of the essential niche Kelly fills.
Thankfully, he hasn’t been off air entirely, as he has returned to RTE Radio One after dark as host of The Reading List, a new show in which Kelly and his guests take another look at neglected or otherwise undNeigr-eallp a pLraewcisaot n ed Hcicliaesnsd ic a nerocviealms. This week’s end te rsytw ru ams rTeh me Hi na eu snt,til nm go Odf ia Hill House byqSu ha it ruler yaJu at cfkusgoit n, atfaumrnonukksly filmed in 1963 by director Robert Wise as The Haunting. The show featured some genuinely creepy readings, as well as a tantalizing introduction to the book itself by Irish author John Boyne and Jackson’s biographer Ruth Franklin. It was good to hear Kelly back on Radio One again.
The Reading List is one of a number of shows lined up to replace The Late Debate during the Dail summer recess. The others are lighter fare. Wednesday’s newcomer is That Baz Thing, which, in the words of host Baz Ashmawy, is “where I pretty much talk about whatever I feel like, to be honest”.
This week’s show explored whether people spend too much time on social media these days, and whether constantly staring at screens is ruining family life. Are we being forced by circumstance to live online, Baz wanted to know, or is complaining about it a waste of time since the old world isn’t coming back either way?
It made for an engaging discussion. Psychotherapist Trish Murphy touched on the dangers when a person’s outside and inside selves come into conflict, as they often do when constructing a persona for public consumption. Baz also questioned whether worrying about the effect of social media was simply evidence of a moral panic akin to the alarm around TV and rock music when they first came along too.
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Crime writer Liz Nugent, meanwhile, was a guest on Monday’s Ray D’Arcy Show, where she revealed that, instead of writing “I did not know how they were going to punish me” in a recent draft of her new novel, she’d actually written: “I did not know how they were going to publish me.” Rarely has the “Freudian fear” of even very successful authors been summed up better.