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Sean O’Rourke on RTE’s Today programme is sharp and never behind the door.
Michael Wolff, the author of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, was his guest on the Today programme.
Wolff confessed that he thought his book would create a few waves but it turned out he was riding a tsunami.
Sean didn’t go for the soft touch, he got to the nub.
Some reporters were asking where does the journalism end and the gossip begin, he said. Wolff argued that he was just telling the world what they otherwise would not know.
O’Rourke also dallied with the glamour of the Golden Globes. Oprah Winfrey stole the show with her barnstorming speech, worthy of a president.
But it was RTÉ’s Ryan Tubridy who bagged the best guests to chat about the Oprah factor – Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks.
Do you think she’ll run for president, asked Tubridy.
“She’s much more qualified than the current occupant,” said Streep. You could tell she was arching her eyebrows and rolling her eyes, even on the radio.
It was, Streep said, Oprah’s “capacious humanity”, her ability to speak to everyone. At the Golden Globes, when Oprah spoke, the servers came out of the kitchen, people came out of the rest rooms, everyone wanted to listen, she said.
Hanks had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.
While Oprah was speaking, the waters out on the hotel patio parted ever so slightly and Gary Oldman thought he was watching Winston Churchill, he joked.
Oprah also featured on Radio 4’s Profile. Here was the rags-to-riches tale of the little girl who was so poor that her grandmother dressed in her clothes made from potato sacking.
Now she is the richest black woman in the world. In between, there were harrowing stories of abuse and harsh times. But central to it all was the American dream, how Oprah pulled herself up by the bootstraps and made it big.
We were also treated to that moment when all 276 guests in her TV show audience were told to open their gifts... the screams and the yells and the thrill when each and everyone found the keys to a brand new car.
Ditch the old jalopy. Oprah for president!
