Week 9 Radio Blog

This week’s article for our radio blog was a series of interviews and a debate from an episode of Joe Duffy’s Liveline. The piece opens with an advertisement followed with the opening music. This piece will be unsurprising to anyone who is familiar with the format of a Joe Duffy radio segment. People ring in to the show and an interview or debate follows. The first two interviews are emotional. A man discusses the passing of his father due to the Covid-19 epidemic. Duffy’s questions are targeted to specifically draw out emotional answers and he comes across as sympathetic. We listen to a woman in the second interview, discussing how her mother passed and the limits that the virus has put on her mother’s funeral. The Coronavirus seems to be a theme in this episode. We then have two expecting fathers call in discussing the impact the virus has on them and their partners in relation to their maternity hospitals. This discussion becomes adversarial when two more callers join in and support the choices of the hospitals. They suggest that the two men take the hospitals precautions on board and roll with the punches. Preventing the spread of the virus should be a massive consideration in these exceptional times. There are advertisements and music segments throughout the piece.