Radio: Important people and hair-pulling

My father used to demand silence at the dinner table for “an important” programme at one o'clock every... Sunday. Silence while we endured important people talking about important matters, interminably, in important voices, interviewed by important interviewers with important questions. I hated them, all of them. We all did (ie my seven siblings and I). Even my mother hated them. Still does.
Now the Senor de la Casa listens irritably every Sunday to This Week, irritably because the brats and I don't have the same reverence. Never once did I listen to it until last Sunday (2 April) when my sense of duty as a reviewer prevailed.
The same fellow that was there when I was one and a half is still presenting it! Gerald Barry. The same important tone, the same important questions, the same important interviewee-types.
First up was Senator John McCain, the US republican who supports a more liberal immigration regime in the US, something to do with there being a large immigrant population in his home state, Arizona. He was interviewed by someone for about ten minutes and said not a single thing we had not known before. But he was (is?) an important person. Then we had an archbishop talking about the last Pope and this Pope. You can't get more important than that. Then an interview with Michael McDowell and the Garda Commissioner, followed by an interview with the army chief of staff. Not a single one of them said a single thing worth listening to. And there I had been for the last 34 years of my life carrying around a guilt burden for having closed my mind off to this important programme.
The Senor de la Casa couldn't hold back a jibe during This Week, although the rest of us are expected to be mute during this important hour most Sundays. It had to do with the story of a woman garda pulling the hair of a Donegal lady. “They are all the same”, the Senor de la Casa said, in reference not to Donegal ladies (for he doesn't know any of these, as far as I know). The reference was to the gardaí and said deliberately to rile me because my father had been a guard for 35 years.
There had been sniggering all week while we had a surfeit of garda tales on the Tonight with Vincent Browne's programme. And here I tread cautiously for the same Vincent Browne is senor de la magazine. So let me make it clear, the Tonight programme is invariably scintillating, great interviews, a few important persons, penetrating questions, humour, wit, wisdom, great coughing and wondrous sighs. Ok?
Anyway, a big deal is being made of this hair pulling. Good God, even if someone's hair got pulled a few times – and let me make it clear no guard in Cork ever pulled a hair out of anyone's head – we hardly need a Tribunal to tell us about it. Nor endless reconstructions. The Senor de la Casa had my head done in during the week turning up the readings from the Morris Tribunal. Is hair pulling all that investigative journalism is about nowadays?
Have you heard the ad on RTÉ radio and television about the shame befalling those who fail to pay the TV license fee to RTÉ? Shame? What shame? A badge of pride I would have thought, a protest at being required to pay RTÉ a fee for the pleasure of watching, not necessarily anything RTÉ provides but for watching anything on television.
A few years ago they had an ad of someone skulking around a video shop, who apparently hadn't paid RTÉ its fee. Without a trace of irony RTÉ was saying that even if all you want to do is to watch videos on television, you have pay RTÉ. At present they are running an ad on television of a boss in an office being morto at being caught not having paid RTÉ, while using the company TV set to show video presentations that presumably had nothing at all to do with RTÉ. What is the shame or embarrassment there? What dimwit thought up that campaign?