Life

Radio review: Peter Curran delivers a warm spark of joy on a bleak Sunday

Nuala McCann
Nuala McCann Nuala McCann

Pick of the Week Radio

Presenter Peter Curran brings to Pick of the Week a warm spark of joy that works a charm for bleak Sunday blues.

Last Sunday’s episode was like sinking into a warm bath. He’s a relaxed presenter and maybe it’s the local accent that makes him more endearing.

He was speaking, he said, under “a twinkly evening sky” and he had “a strange exotic feeling … what’s that …optimism?”

But maybe it was just the good news as brought by Prof John Bell and we heard it again, yes, there’s a vaccine that works, yes soon.

“That felt lovely, didn’t it ….the best yes, yes, yes, since Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally” said Peter.

We shifted seamlessly from there to the White House and the question of whether we should pity Donald Trump as it is rough losing power and he is reportedly playing golf and eating too many hamburgers these days.

The Today programme turned to the classics to see if we might learn from the Ancient World.

Perhaps he’s a Nero figure, going around the post election White House looking for people and nobody replies?

Or maybe he is a touch Agamemnon “incredibly petulant, he stands there helplessly stamping his feet”.

There was the best of rollicking music too from one Tickler, a rag-time piano player who entertained in saloons and brothels and whose career began back in the day when Jelly Roll Morton was “hot stuff”.

At 17, he threw away his schoolbag and took up the piano at Far Rock Away, a beach resort near Coney Island. The rest is history.

Me? Like the rest of the world, I’m looking to make 2020 history too.

Curran was upbeat even when he shared his own grim memories of this year – his mother died during the pandemic.

There was an underlying comic hysteria at the small funeral, he said, as four sheep appeared from nowhere to look on from a respectable distance, and one of the undertakers nearly fell in on top of her.

This segued into a clip from the Listening Project where two funeral organisers talked strange times.

The beauty of Pick of the Week is it leads you on to great riches across radio that you might have missed… pearls to pick up, tiny sparks of light at the end of a dark tunnel.