Making a drama out of horrors of the past
JUST weeks after deputising for the usual RTE Radio One host over the summer, Miriam O’Callaghan was back on Today With Sean O’Rourke, and once again the show had been given a Today With Miriam jingle in her honour.
Why does no one else who sits in for O’Rourke get this special treatment? Could it be that O’Callaghan is secretly being eased in as a permanent replacement? Something’s definitely going on there.
Since it was the day before Halloween, RTE’s favourite daughter presided over the traditional warning about the dangers of bonfires and fireworks. An important issue, obviously; but balancing it out with some Halloween fun wouldn’t have hurt either.
The Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk got into the spirit of the holiday by interviewing the authors of a new prequel to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, including a descendant of the Dublin horror writer himself. (Ryan Tubridy had interviewed the same fellow a while ago on his morning show, but Pat’s chat was perfectly pitched to the time of year). Tom Dunne, fronting Moncrieff on the same station also did his bit by exploring why people like to be scared. Talk radio can’t all be about politics.
This week’s Drama On One on RTE Radio One was James’s Story by American dramatist David Zane Mairowitz, in which the conspicuously English titular character recalled his visit to Dingle in 1968, where an elderly farmer confessed: “I killed an Englishman once.” It was during the War of Independence, when he was only a teenager, but he’d regretted it ever since. Now he saw a chance to unburden his soul.
What made the play stand out was that James’s recollection of this encounter was continually interrupted by the “story poacher”, played by Stephen Rea, who amended and commented on the veracity of the story as he went along. The drama was full of humour and pathos, and utterly engrossing from the off, with plenty worth saying about shared memory and collective guilt, not to mention the shifting nature of stories. This particular incident was relayed to the real James in 1968, but, it turned out, was likely never to have happened at all. It was Rea’s contribution, though, which elevated it above the ordinary; it’s a cliche, but he could read the telephone directory and make it sound compelling.
Last Wednesday’s Ray D’Arcy Show featured the welcome return to the airwaves of Mike Murphy. There are few broadcasters for which the epithet “legend” is deserved, but Murphy's unarguably one of that select group. He and his wife now live part of the year in America abd enjoy travelling, but he admitted: "I'd hate people to think 'oh god, this guy's an awful pain, with money to burn'. because I haven't. I was paid by RTE for many years, and you know what that results in — semi-bankruptcy.”
D’Arcy chuckled gamely, but long gone are the days of shoestring wages for star names. Focus quickly shifted to Murphy’s early days at the station’s Henry Street base in the heart of Dublin, where Terry Wogan was the senior announcer. Great stories. Great characters. Radio is slicker, shinier these days, but it’s a far duller place.