Radio Review: One can only hope that sometime during his contract negotiations Eamon Dunphy drew himself up to his full height, threw his pen across the room and said "Breakfast Show? I AM The Breakfast Show," because without him, those two hours on Newstalk 106 can be a very dreary listen.
As Dunphy has never been too shy about taking the odd day off, over the years the powers that be at the station have had the opportunity to try out several presenters - from novelty radio turns such as Sen David Norris to blokes obviously enjoying doing a bit of a nixer, mostly print journalists such as Shane Ross. But like him or loathe him - and I happily ricochet between the two, often in the space of five minutes - the reality is that no one has yet really matched Dunphy for sheer force of personality. This week's stand-in is the most mysterious choice yet, with British academic Richard Aldous - who comes across as bland as baby rice and who sounds like he's on a busman's holiday from a regional radio station somewhere north of Essex. His producer should at least have given him the handy guide to Irish pronunciation before letting him on air.
Dunphy is on record as saying that he wants to spend more time on his football coverage but that hasn't prevented George Hamilton coming up with a very strange mix of the two (World Cup Hamilton Scores, Lyric Fm, Saturday). Even though the veteran RTÉ sports commentator lowers his voice and sounds quite a bit posher when he's presenting on Lyric, for this listener at least there has always been a bit of a credibility gap. I can't be the only one who tunes into Lyric on a Saturday to escape sport but he's marking the World Cup with a special version of his show, broadcast from Germany, that mixes music with soccer anecdotes.
The leap from Chelsea to Chopin sounds more than a bit forced. He played Nessun Dorma because a bloke from Tipperary at the Poland/Germany match asked for a request for the folks back home, and after Swing Low, Sweet Chariot Hamilton commented "it's not exactly a football song, but it sat nicely there". But for non-sequiturs of Alan Partridge proportions, it'd be hard to beat "From the manly music of Beethoven to the football music of Handel, well, they did choose it as the fanfare for the Champions' League".
A far more successful mix is A Spell of Words and Music (Lyric Fm, Sunday) - a most intriguing and thoroughly relaxing new four-part series presented by Pat Donlon. She is a most erudite presenter, wearing her knowledge lightly and drawing listeners into a fascinating world. The series explores the relationship between words and music and this week she looked at the fascination with the Orient that hit Europe at the start of the 20th century. I'll Sing Thee songs of Araby and Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar were hits, Rudolph Valentino was The Sheik, Shelley's Indian Love Song was set to music by Delius and Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was the most quoted poem.
Heeding the rumble of a distant drum, Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday) took a sideways look the World Cup with a feature from Gort where the Brazilian population has been estimated to be close to 1,000. It sounded jolly, but having listened to Half My Heart (Clare FM, Saturday), the reality of the migrant experience isn't so colourful. Presenter and producer Paula Carroll was a deserving winner of a John Healy media award this year for this superb documentary which explores the lives of the Brazilian migrant worker community in the western town. She found that many are undocumented and a local man who emigrated to London in the 1950s said the early morning scenes at the square in Gort where migrants stand around waiting to be hired for a day's work were reminiscent of Irish workers back then in Cricklewood. Rates as low as €40 for a day's labouring are not unheard of. The main subject of the documentary was Lucimeire Trindade who, along with her father, husband and cousins, works in the meat-packing industry in Gort. Carroll accompanied her on her annual visit to her children, a three-year-old and a six-year-old being raised by her mother at home in their very poor town in Brazil. Money sent from Gort has made a big difference to the quality of the lives of hundreds of households there but the cost in terms of loneliness and fractured families is high.
This thought-provoking programme got its title from Tridade saying that half her heart is in Gort but the other half is in Brazil. Puts a bit of perspective on the samba and soccer coverage.
