Along with all his other obvious gifts, Marty Morrissey is able to get out of bed on an Easter Monday (RTÉ1, 9am) and do his job. Not only does this demonstrate an admirable work ethic on his part, it confers a kind of moral authority on him that can only burnish his brand.
We know RTÉ and Newstalk are inclined to allow their top talent to take full advantage of the long weekends, as if they were civil servants who need a break from the dreariness of the workplace.
We have come to accept this, but deep down I think we resent the idea that people with these brilliant jobs are loafing around at home when they might be doing something useful – something that seems to come so easily to one Marty Morrissey.
Bank holiday Monday mornings are now his domain, a permanent feature of the ever-expanding Morrissey portfolio. You sense he saw an opening there, like a cute rural TD who can be found at funerals that the other TDs somehow don’t know about, or just don’t bother to attend, because they think they are getting too big for that game.
Marty takes nothing for granted. He knows that in show business, 90pc of success is just showing up – especially when others are ostentatiously not showing up, when the whole station seems to be all too aware of striking that work/life balance, without the work.
Much of the heavy lifting these days is done by whoever slides the old tapes into the machine, to play a neglected documentary or a repeat, such as the RTÉ Concert Orchestra’s version of Radiohead: A Jazz Symphony – the mere idea of it would give you “the bends”.
Yet it was strangely pleasing too, in its essential madness. A real winner on the day was The County Measure (RTÉ1, Easter Monday, 11am), which followed Morrissey’s performance directly, and which contained some of the salient features of Martydom. The series involves Vincent Woods travelling to 32 counties to explore the culture, music, heritage and sport in what is a kind of radio atlas of Ireland.
Now it would be remiss of me not to mention I thought of this myself a million years ago in Hot Press, in a column called ‘The Counties of Ireland’, written under the pen-name ‘Rambler’. The one slight difference is that Woods tends to celebrate the counties, whereas Rambler was more inclined towards, shall we say, constructive criticism.
But there’s room for the Woods approach too. Wicklow was the county selected for this outing, and as someone who lives there I have to say he covered the ground with admirable zeal.
Amusingly, he recalled the writer Paddy Woodworth describing the scene in which he confided his boyhood literary ambitions to a Wicklow farmer, who replied: “You’ll find no poetry here.” The words were said without irony, “spoken as dawn was spreading fire over the Sugar Loaf mountain and down into Calary Bog”.
Woods was spreading fire too, extolling “a painter’s landscape and a traveller’s Eden, grey stone roads… huge cloud scurries… the garden county of bogland, pine trees, walks, estates…”
No, this is not the place to go if you’re looking for Rambler’s many hearts of darkness. But it is a good place. Indeed in this “landmark” series, it is 32 good places.
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He was rewarded with the “nice headsets” and relative opulence of the studio
John Fardy devoted his Easter edition of Screentime (Newstalk, Saturdays, 6pm ) to the funniest films ever made, with Chris Wasser and Aoife Barry. This was a departure from his usual format, but he showed up on the long weekend and was rewarded with the “nice headsets” and relative opulence of the Off the Ball studio.
Tragically, as he described his fine surroundings, he mentioned this would normally be the place they’d be talking about matches at “Bramble Lane” and the like. That would be Bramall Lane, and his egregious error will have persuaded the OTB team that the only way to cleanse that studio is to perform some sort of exorcism.
Yet they didn’t do their normal show either on the evening of Easter Monday, almost as if they too are experimenting with the work/life balance.
When Joe Duffy said that those lads never go home, he meant it literally. If they now have homes to go to, they might well come in to that lovely studio some day and find Marty Morrissey sitting there – very much on the ball.
