The Trib

by David Kenny

  With their previous film Ratatouille, Pixar set the bar very high. Here, they take the limitations of the family animation and launch them into space. In 700 years’ time, when the remnants of our culture are being excavated and studied by historians for clues as to what we were like, I hope a little piece of Wall-E survives.

  EITHNE TYNAN

  Radio reviews

  Nautical nitwits

  Fianna Fáil set sail for the high seas of absurdity.

  23 January 2011

  The ‘Not a Heave in the Classic Sense’ tour rolled into town last week, and what a blast it was for Heave Heads. There were bootlegs, T-shirts and dancing bears, and you were never more than five minutes away from a radio interview with group leader Micheál Garcia Martin.

  The tour was tugging a parade of metaphors behind it (to which I’ve just added another. Curses). Best of all was the one from finance minister Brian Lenihan, who described himself on the News at One as being too busy in the ‘engine room’ to have time to think about a coup.

  So you’ve got the finance minister as black-faced urchin, shovelling coal below decks (‘More steam please, Mr Lenihan!’). You’ve got Brian Cowen in the wheelhouse, loaded to the gunwales, singing, ‘If you’ll give me some grog, I’ll sing you a song. Way, Hey, Blow the Man Down.’ The Greens are on the poop deck as usual, talking about where best to position their solitary deckchair (aka the Climate Change Bill). That leaves only one actor to play Roger the Cabin Boy, so it has to be Micheál Martin.

  Martin did so many radio interviews on Monday that listeners will have begun to suspect cloning. After all, it wouldn’t have been that hard to get a clone to do some of these interviews. You just programme it to say ‘not a heave in the classic sense’ and ‘fire in the belly’ over and over. On Newstalk’s Breakfast, he introduced a few inept metaphors, but none of them stuck, certainly not once they had been outdone by the vastly superior Captain Pugwash series. He could have ‘walked off the pitch’, he said. There was talk of ‘sacrificial lambs’ and the usual economic ‘tsunami’ stuff. At one point Ivan Yates even went so far as to liken the Taoiseach to ‘a pinball’. But in the end all parties pulled themselves together and settled on a nautical course.

  Lamenting the fact that Brian Cowen had been more reactive than proactive, Martin said ‘there comes a time when you have to push the boat out and be commanding the air space’. Shiver me timbers, tis not a ship at all, tis a seaplane. No wonder they can’t agree.

  Later in the morning, Martin appeared on The Tubridy Show (2FM). Some of his colleagues may have been wondering why he bothered, with one TD quoted in the Irish Times as saying that not many Fianna Fáil deputies listen to The Tubridy Show, but Martin would probably find that hard to believe, considering how many Fianna Fáil TDs are on Ryan Tubridy’s Christmas card list.

  Tubridy advised Micheál Martin to resign if Brian Cowen won the confidence motion. ‘I think it’s untenable for you to remain in cabinet with no confidence in the Taoiseach,’ he counselled. Give it a rest, Tubridy, will you? Avast!

  Then, weirdly, he began asking Martin about the death of his daughter, a line of questioning that seemed ill-timed, unreasonable, even cruel. Soon we saw the reason for it.

  ‘I was wondering, as a father myself, how you would pick yourself up after that. Because I know that I wouldn’t ... I would have to disappear, probably for a long time,’ said Tubridy, relishing the chance to talk about Tubridy.

  Micheál Martin said he didn’t think the questions were appropriate but offered to talk about it another time. He was very gracious about it. I’d have keel-hauled Tubridy, the scurvy son of a biscuit-eater.

  Then, on Tuesday’s News at One, Brian Lenihan was accused of having spotted the iceberg long ago. Various backbenchers had seen the finance minister snooping around amid ships with a spyglass, despite his protestations about being in the engine room the whole time.

  ‘I’m certainly getting plenty of muck on my hands but it’s very important that I work in that engine room,’ said Lenihan. His first duty is to the country, etc etc. Under no circumstances should personal ambition prevail over the interests of the country and so on. I tell you, sanctimonious wasn’t in it with him: Master Bates promotes his mission of self-love.

  It’s easy like Sunday morning, only at rush hour

  8 March 2009

  ‘On this drivetime show, we not only give you talk, we give you music,’ announced Tom McGurk on his first programme for 4FM. Now whose idea was that, I wonder?

  The people behind 4FM, the new multi-city radio station aimed at older listeners, must never listen to the radio themselves if they honestly think there isn’t enough Tina Turner on it already. They also clearly believe there’s a vast ‘demographic’ of listeners who like nothing better than a bit of Elton John in the middle of a serious interview. Presumably these listeners also ask for a side of ice-cream with their salmon or beef, and draw little cartoons in the margins of their tax returns.

  There are some serious things that can reasonably be interrupted by music – funeral masses come to mind – but current affairs is not one of them. RTÉ tried the same thing years ago on Tonight with Vincent Browne (a minute’s silence please) and it was just as idiotic as it sounds. Browne would break off from filleting some petrified public servant for a recording of Kathleen Mavourneen, and no-one knew where they were.

  At any rate, McGurk’s musical interludes, combined with his own softly-softly approach, meant that his interview on Monday with Taoiseach Brian Cowen was more like Desert Island Discs than Drivetime. Think Sunday morning instead of rush hour.

  In case you’ve been finding lately, reader, that you’re getting just a teensy-weensy bit sick of the sight and sound of Brian Cowen and the rest of the whole godforsaken lot of them, we won’t retrace the whole interview here. But there were one or two highlights worth revisiting for comedy’s sake (since laughter, unlike music, is entirely acceptable in the midst of current affairs).

  McGurk thanked the Taoiseach for coming in, and squeezed in a plug, speculating that Cowen’s presence was a signal that he wanted ‘to recognise that 4FM, despite all the economic devastation, is up there and is going to succeed’.

  The Taoiseach responded with the following stream of consciousness, as if bent on forging, in the smithy of his soul, the uncreated conscience of his race: ‘I think it’s a great indication of just the sort of people, the can-do attitude that we need in this country to be honest, and the faith that people have in the project and the concept that they’ve devised and that they’ve worked on ... if I may say so a very strong presentation team which shows I think a great degree of confidence in the professionalism of those who have, uh, worked so hard to bring this day about.’

  Cowen also used his new favourite quote, lambasting those commentators who say the economy was never anything more than ‘a building site with a flagpole on top’. Love that. He’ll never get rid of that one now.

  McGurk wanted to know if the Taoiseach was hurt by the accusation that he had lost his leadership. He also asked if he was being kept awake. I’m not joking. ‘Are you sleeping well? Do you sleep well?’ he inquired, much as you might ask a feeble relative in hospital. (Mind you, if you are visiting someone in hospital, it’s more germane to ask: ‘Have you seen anyone yet who is in any way remotely connected, even if only by marriage, to your consultant?’)

  For the record, Cowen was not hurt, and is sleeping, but he suddenly went all surfer dude on us. ‘A lot of politics is about psychology,’ he said. ‘People have to get their heads to where we’re actually at.’ Like, far out, totally. The Cowenmeister. El Cowenerino.

  Even some DJs have been getting away from playing music these days, on the grounds that audiences seem to prefer giddy chat to exhausted hits. Witness Tom Dunne, erstwhile host of one of the few respectable music programmes on mainstream radio, and now host of yet another brainless forum for listeners’ texts.

  Having said that, last Tuesday your corresp
ondent became new all-time bestest friends with Tom Dunne, after listening to his feisty defence of air travel, and of cars. After all, this green hegemony is all very well, but it can only go so far, and you can keep your sanctimonious hands off my Alfa.

  Dunne was interviewing Alex Hochuli, founder of Modern Movement, an organisation set up recently to counter the arguments (mostly environmental) against aviation. It’s high time, before taxation boots us all out of the sky and the rich have it to themselves again.

  Predictably enough, the interview was followed by a stream of texts, with one listener asking won’t someone please think of the children. Dunne replied that he is thinking of the children, that he wants his children to inherit a planet they can fly around in. Air high five.

  Flaws of science: bang goes RTÉ’s interest in physics

  14 September 2008

  It was billed as Big Bang Day, and turned out to be Tiny Blip Day. However, we did learn something from the CERN experiment, and that is that physicists are a different species altogether. Delayed gratification isn’t in it with them.

  Consider that famous experiment at Stanford, when a group of four-year-olds were given a marshmallow and told they could have another one if they waited twenty minutes before eating the first. Those four-year-olds who ate the marshmallow at once, reasoning with a pragmatism beyond their years that they might be dead in twenty minutes, would never have become CERN physicists.

  Four-year-old future physicists would exchange their marshmal-low for a giant doughnut and instead of eating it they would conduct invisible experiments on it, and cry with happiness when the results were displayed for a fraction of a second on a computer screen.

  Morning Ireland spoke with Leo Enright just before the event, and he was as excited as usual. But even though we’ve come to expect Leo Enright to be right there at the nucleus of any scientific event, he wasn’t in Switzerland but in Dublin. ‘I’m at the science gallery at Trinity College,’ he said, and then went on to satisfy the two main preoccupations of the national broadcaster: first, does the story have an Irish connection?; second, is there any way to link it to the M50?

  ‘Ireland has a very, very strong history of involvement in particle physics,’ Enright declared. ‘You’ll remember, of course, that it was an Irishman who split the atom – the wonderful, wonderful Ernest Walton.’ And we all stood taller and hummed a bar of A Nation Once Again.

  Cathal Mac Coille wanted to know when things were going to get interesting. He may have had his suspicions already about the pace at which things get interesting in physics. ‘It’s already interesting,’ said Enright. That was when he brought in the M50, to give us something to relate to, don’t you know.

  ‘If you put 500 cars at one end of the M50 and 500 cars at the other end and collided them at the toll bridge in Lucan, at 100 km/h, the energy released would be roughly the same as the energy that’s going to be released by these tiny bunches of protons colliding with another,’ said Enright. Mac Coille may have mused that it would take a lot less than thirty years and €6 billion to crash 1,000 cars on the M50, and it would make a better story for Morning Ireland.

  Meanwhile, Andrew Marr was in the CERN control room for the BBC World Service, all set to report live on the big moment. ‘We’re still waiting,’ he said. Then he said, ‘Here we go.’ Then he said, ‘Here we go again.’ Then he was advised it would be another forty-eight seconds, which he struggled valiantly to fill, and at last the tiny blip happened.

  ‘Yes!’ exclaimed Marr. ‘Yes, they’ve done it! That is a relief. A wonderful moment to see that flash on the screen.’

  I suppose he couldn’t help being swept along by the thing. Cathal Mac Coille wasn’t, though. Back in the Morning Ireland studio, having played a clip of the blip, he was persisting with the question as to when exactly this will get interesting.

  ‘It’s absolutely thrilling,’ Ronan McNulty of UCD told him, ‘but it’s going to be a while before enough data comes out of that, before we can actually say something. It’s not like the moon launch where you go ten, nine, eight and off we go.’

  So that’s it then. Sit tight. Have a marshmallow.

  Who does Joe Duffy think he is ... Bertie Ahern?

  28 September 2008

  It’s been a strenuous week down here in The Country. There was the bungalow to be repainted, the cow dung to be scraped off the generic family saloon and six cakes of brown soda to be baked in preparation for the Dubliners’ visit.

  Practically every radio programme vacated the capital this week and visited the National Ploughing Championships, the better to patronise rural-dwellers at close range.

  Once outside Dublin, they found there was little to talk about. On Monday’s Mooney Show, Brenda O’Donoghue invited the nation to consider whether or not she should leave her wellies at home for the trip. This was a lucky intervention by O’Donoghue, as we had grown weary of our four usual concerns – the weather, tractors, the old days and the recession – and needed something else to think about. Bless her.

  The following day, she was good enough to remind us of this national dilemma. ‘First of all, Derek,’ she roared, causing the walls of the RTÉ tent to flap alarmingly despite the lack of a breeze, ‘I asked the question yesterday on the show, should I ditch the wellies? And I have! I’ve no wellies on!’

  One listener tried to spark up interest in the price of combine harvesters. A bystander informed us they cost about €180,000. Everyone was quietly aghast that farmers have that much money but no one would say it so far from Montrose. Farm Week’s Damien O’Reilly exclaimed that there are tractors that cost a quarter of a million.

  ‘They have everything in them, Derek,’ he said.

  ‘Like what, Damien?,’ asked Mooney.

  O’Reilly paused for a moment. ‘Air conditioning, the whole lot ... CD players,’ he said.

  Possibly the only thing more boring than a live broadcast from the Ploughing Championships is other people’s family history. And have you noticed that people who say they’re interested in genealogy only ever want to talk about their ancestors? They don’t give a toss about yours. To borrow from another axiom, genealogy is like farts: you can just about stand your own.

  Nevertheless, The Tubridy Show made a big deal out of the family history of Liveline’s Joe Duffy on Monday, as he was to be featured in the TV programme Who Do You Think You Are? that evening.

  Before we could get on to the enthralling subject of Duffy’s great-grandpappy, though, we had to wait for him to get to the end of a sermon that was heavy with bitterness. Seemingly the programme’s title had touched a nerve.

  ‘I grew up with that and I still get it. I got it yesterday in the papers, didn’t I? Who the eff do you think you are? In Dublin that phrase has a completely different connotation. And it’s about not losing the run of yourself, and don’t become hubristic and don’t start believing what you do is as important as a nurse or a doctor or a fire-man or a teacher.’

  Were any other listeners trying to identify whom Duffy sounded like at that moment? The chip on the shoulder, the sullen resentment, the stagy common sense ... Didn’t he remind you of Bertie Ahern?

  For a man who doesn’t believe in ‘losing the run of yourself’, though, Duffy can’t seem to keep a sentence in check. Asked by Tubridy if he had got a sense of closure as a result of the programme, Duffy said he believed there were other stories unpicked from the family tree, and went on as follows:

  ‘I keep telling my own three – they’re thirteen – I keep telling them, my granny, who they knew, they knew, because she only died recently and they had sat with her and gone to see her ... She lived in Kilbarrack, in the flats in Kilbarrack, she lived on the fifth floor in a fourteen-storey block and the reason she lived on the fifth floor to the time she died was she had a son who she looked after and she wanted a bigger flat and she wouldn’t live in the senior citizen’s flat.

  ‘She used to get the Dart into town every Thursday to collect her pension in the G
PO and do the shopping in Roches when Roches was Roches, Ryan. That same granny, who my children knew, I saw in the 1960s in a place in Dublin called Keogh Square, which was the Richmond Barracks, 1916, and is now St Michael’s Estate ...

  ‘I saw her in the 1960s cooking on an open fire in a room with no sanitation, no running water, no heat, no electricity, and our novelty was, Ryan, to go down and do toast on a fork on an open fire.’

  All that yakking for a yarn about toast. He should have been a sports commentator.

  PATRICK FREYNE

  TV reviews

  Clown jewels

  Bill Cullen embarks on his annual search for Ireland’s greatest sycophant.

  26 September 2010

  If I was producing TV3’s The Apprentice, each episode would start with a darkened boardroom and an empty spotlight into which ‘local boy made good’ Bill Cullen would step. ‘But where are the clowns?’ he’d croon, staring into the camera with his big sad eyes. ‘There ought to be clowns,’ he’d tunefully assert (Stephen Sondheim’s melody adding force to his insatiable desire for clowns). Then the camera would cut to the reception lobby with the pretend secretary and her not-really-plugged-in laptop. ‘Quick, send in the clowns ...’ Bill would plead desperately through the intercom. ‘Don’t worry,’ the secretary would sing back. ‘They’re aaallreaaaady heeeeere ...’ before turning to this year’s apprentices to say, ‘Mr Cullen will see you now.’