The emperor appears in the buff yet again. After a half-hour interview with U2 (well, mainly with Bono), you get to wonder for the umpteenth time at how so many people can conspire to pretend that the middle of the road is actually a dark highway through the rock and roll wilderness. And that's before you even get started on Bono's tedious grandstanding.

BBC Radio 4's arts show, Front Row, comprised a special programme on U2 on Tuesday. Presenter John Wilson came to Dublin to listen to them rehearse and spoke to them (well, mainly to Bono) about music and longevity and saving the world and what have you... not about their tax affairs, mind.

He began by asking them about the way they like to associate their albums with a place – Morocco, in the case of this latest one.

"It's a thing I've learned from poets, really," said Bono. "Find a physical location and suddenly the book of poetry will gather around it... The artist always wants to be somehow a lightning rod for what's going on in the world" – oh God the nausea – "even if it's just playing straight-ahead, stupid, rock and roll, and that's my favourite."

Wilson asked him somewhat reverently about his lyrics. He wanted to know if the music for him was a release from the "serious stuff". He didn't ask him about this memorable lyric from Get on Your Boots: "That's someone's stuff they're blowing up/ We're into growing up/ Women of the future/ Hold the big revelations". That must be the kind of poetry that gathers around the luckless inhabitants of Fez.

It was a pity, really, that this interview wasn't done by Mark Lawson, sometime Front Row presenter. He and Bono would have been so far up themselves we mightn't have been able to hear them at all. They'd have to have sent in tiny microphones, like those little cameras that they use in hospitals to probe unmentionable parts of the body.

Bono defended George Bush, because Bush committed $70bn to "our asks" on Aids treatment. He admitted this was awkward and not very cool. "It's annoying. I can take the bottles and the rocks and the embarrassment to my bandmates here, but I will stay that most annoying of things, a single-issue protagonist."

That's grand so, boss, fair play to you. Just a few more bob in income tax now, boss, and we'll be set. Thanks boss.

From not quite rock and roll to not rock and roll at all: pianist Therese Fahy, director of chamber music at the Royal Irish Academy, likes to get together for musical soirees in a friend's house. Thirty or so people turn up with cakes, and they listen to music and "drink cups of tea". It sounds like enough to turn you into Courtney Love, but each to her own, I suppose.

Fahy won a Fulbright scholarship to study for her masters' in St Louis, Missouri, in the 1980s. She was interviewed as part of a new, eight-part series, The Fulbright Experience (Lyric FM, Saturdays). Yes, eight programmes does seem rather a lot. It's well made though.

The Fulbright programme of international student exchange was founded by the late senator J William Fulbright in 1946. Also interviewed was the senator's widow, Harriet, who referred to him throughout, in a weirdly formal way, as "Senator Fulbright", not "Bill". She said his objective in establishing the programme was to promote world peace.

He wanted future leaders – in politics, the arts, education, economics – to have spent time in a foreign culture, in the hope that "they would be far more inclined to use dialogue instead of bullets".

Over 700 Irish people have studied in the US under the programme, and around 500 Americans have come here. John O'Loughlin Kennedy, founder of Concern and a former Fulbright scholar, told us that, of the 718 Irish who have taken part, 220 are now lecturing in third-level institutions. There are also "successful businessmen" and "two CEOs of banks", he said. Hmmm, might not be the best time to advertise that.

Presumably at some point over the next eight weeks, this series will cover the most interesting recent story about the Fulbright programme – the case of the seven Palestinians who won scholarships last year but couldn't take them up because Israel wouldn't give them exit visas to leave Gaza. The scholarships were "redirected" (withdrawn), but after intervention by Condoleezza Rice (or "Condi", as Bono calls her), they were reinstated. Then, mysteriously and at the last minute, three of the students' visas were revoked by the US. Fulbright himself, remember, was a staunch and fearless critic of Israel, and in particular of Israel's undue influence on American politics. So it's not all tea and cakes.

etynan@tribune.ie