So it was when Marian Finucanemet Mary McAleese at Aras an Uachtarain on Christmas Eve. It was liable to bring out the punk rocker in you, listening to two such successful, clever, immaculately groomed women who sound like they've never done anything more shameful than reading in bad light or forgetting to floss. I know nobody expects crack in a case like this, but we'd have liked something stronger than sweet tea.

McAleese offered a very girly interview; she brought hoovering into it, and shopping, and cooking, and clothes, and the children . . . things you suspect she would not have mentioned if her interviewer had been a man. In response, Finucane was unfailingly polite and agreeable and inclined to laugh at McAleese's feeble jokes. I suppose what could she do?

Finucane prefaced the piece by reading out the Sunday newspaper headlines as usual, including this one from the Mail on Sunday: "McAleese sick with worry over the new Ireland", which was a story gleaned from the president's remarks to Finucane deploring gangland murders.

Do you ever find yourself wondering whose news sense is off-beam with stories like this, yours or theirs?

Mary McAleese says she finds gangland killings worrying, and it makes the front page. Dog bites man.

Now, if she had said she didn't give a toss how many meatheads-with-nicknames cancel each other out, that would have been news of the man-bites-dog variety. It might also have reflected the way a lot of people feel, at least those of us who don't fantasise about living in our very own episode of CSI.

In the end, McAleese was full of sanguine hopes that the next generation would be "better problemsolvers" and would stop killing themselves and each other, and would develop a responsible attitude to alcohol and drugs and road safety, and would see the peace process through. "Please goodness we shall see the flowering of all that, " she said, while Grandfather beamed at her proudly and went on whittling tiny animals from wood.

There was idealism too . . . but it was warmer and saltier and more naturally wholesome . . . on Ronan Kelly's Christmas Day programme, Picking No 11 at the Prince of Wales Hotel. The title of this turned out to be quirkier than the content, but it was a well-made, imaginative, short documentary about the people who turned out on a certain Tuesday evening for a meeting of the Athlone Gramophone Society. Among them was a local GP, Nora Curran, who served in Somalia during her 14 years as an army doctor and seemed unusually humble for a medical professional. Another was a bus driver who does an hour every night in the 'chapel of adoration'. "Religion for me is just the elevation of the ordinary humdrum of life, " he said, with modest conviction.

But most affecting of all was an 82-year-old woman whose husband died five years ago and "left a terrible void" in her existence. "He was an inspiration. . . he enriched my life, " she said. Imagine that . . . real honestto-goodness romance, there in the middle of a function room in the middle of a midland town. New year's resolution number 183: move to Athlone and try the effects of their water.