It’s just another normal week for the royal family
THE PAT KENNY SHOW
Newstalk, weekdays 9am
STEFANIE PREISSNER
Newstalk, bank holiday Monday
SYMPHONICS
RTÉ1, Sundays, 7pm
Last week in this column’s search for Kate Middleton, we were listening to royal correspondent Jennie Bond on Today with Claire Byrne, confirming everything we have always known about royal correspondents – that they seem different to other journalists, the lower types who are always causing trouble for decent men and women who are only doing their best trying to run the world.
Since then, it seems a whole regiment of British hacks has signed up for national service, as it were. They’re all royal correspondents now, denigrating the web loonies who indulge in those “wild conspiracy theories”, offering us the strange spectacle of reporters from organs such as The Sun asking us all to behave like responsible people.
On The Pat Kenny Show with Ivan Yates, there was the perspective of an Irishman, the former Sky News correspondent Enda Brady – now a presenter on TRT World – who has the moral authority of one whose old job would often find him reporting from the real world. If anything Enda was even more scathing than your Jennie Bonds about the tomfoolery that he sees all around him.
With Ivan playing his traditional role as the fella who just wants a bit of a laugh out of life, Enda held the line. He was especially hard on an American chap who does a TV show on which he shared all sorts of unsavoury gossip about William and Kate, and the lady whose name is pronounced “Chumley”. He was probably talking about Stephen Colbert, who is usually a very entertaining and intelligent presenter. The way Enda spoke about him, Colbert might as well be some YouTuber broadcasting to his mates from his garage, desperate for a few clicks.
In fact such was the note of authority in Enda’s analysis, I was starting to feel a bit guilty for allowing myself to stray into the badlands of crude speculation – and then, just before the end, he told Ivan that he had been at Cheltenham the previous Friday, in a box with members of the royal family.
Eh... right.
Sure enough, I saw Princess Anne on the telly that day, enjoying the Gold Cup, and she seemed to be her normal cheerful self.
I hope that settles the matter.
I should make a full declaration too. Eoghan Corry, now Ireland’s leading travel journalist and a frequent contributor to radio shows, was the first person to ask me to write for a national newspaper, The Irish Press. This was back in the days when very few of us journalists would encounter members of the royal family at a social occasion, unless perhaps they happened to be drinking heavily in Mulligan’s pub in Poolbeg Street. Call me irresponsible, but I think it was better then.
Certainly it gives me an insight into what happened when Eoghan was a guest on the bank holiday episode of the Stefanie Preissner show. He had done his travel bit with his usual fluency, and before the ad-break Stefanie said the next guest would be talking about whiskey.
After the interval, she had to break the news that the man who was supposed to come to talk about whiskey hadn’t shown up. As Eoghan stepped in to talk some more about travel, I suspect the thought may have occurred to him that this wasn’t the first time in his professional life that a man with whiskey on his mind was supposed to come to talk, and didn’t show up.
But again, it all worked out fine.
In those olden days, it was also extremely uncommon to hear any good music on RTÉ radio. Now it’s virtually the only kind you hear, and regular readers will know I sometimes miss the days of the bad music, if only because it gave you something to fight against. Still the good stuff just keeps coming, the latest being Symphonics, the series presented by Sheelagh Dempsey which finished last Sunday, but which will surely be broadcast again, due to its excellence.
The idea was to highlight specific instruments that feature in some of the great records of our time. Indeed I was shocked to find that in the episode about stringed instruments, Dempsey talked about the autoharp without mentioning its foremost Irish exponent, the late Chris Twomey of the Lee Valley String Band. But like the flaw in all perfect things, it was probably deliberate.