Radio: Land of the free and pints of Guinness

Looking through the schedules last week, my eye was caught by a programme called The 51st State (R4). Now, when I were a lad, this was a sour way of referring to an over-Americanised (culturally and economically dependent) Britain; another was the Orwellian Airstrip One, the idea being to reflect the true nature of the Special Relationship and Margaret Thatcher's gerontophilic relationship with Ronald Reagan.

Which should teach me to live in the past: for now it refers, in a gee- whizz fashion, to the high level of US investment in the Republic of Ireland. The point is this - the Irish, if this programme is anything to go by, are happy to be known as the 51st state. (And it is a measure of Britain's decline that we are not even fit to hold that dubiously coveted title any more.) As they say in County Galway: Boston is the next parish.

The programme began inauspiciously, and depressingly, with some jumped- up luxury car dealer telling us how eight times more Jaguars are being sold now than five years ago. Well, yippee. There was a "very broad spread of people" buying these cars. Really? You mean plenty of black people, HIV-positive men, priests, and radio reviewers? No, "broad" here means very rich people in their thirties and forties - as well as very rich people in their fifties.

So, said the interviewer, it's all right to say "I have money"? "Yes," said the car dealer, "and why not?"

Well, because it's vulgar, for one thing (didn't the word "ostentatious" once have pejorative overtones?), and it highlights the widening gap between rich and poor in Ireland. While eight times as many Jags, and indeed 18 times as many convertibles, are being sold in Ireland as happened five years ago, I have the strangest feeling that the number of poor people in Ireland has not decreased by a similar factor.

Still, it has to be better in Ireland than it was. The Catholic church doesn't have the population in as strong a headlock as it had before, and the cost of housing in Dublin is pricing academics from Manchester out of the market. Wait a bit, that's a bad thing. As is the decline in the number of people who sit around drinking Guinness all day, although the last time I was in Dublin I don't recall the pumps exactly rusting with disuse.

Meanwhile, on Radio 3, we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of Goethe's birth. Now, we have a problem with Goethe in this country, in a way that other countries do not. Simply, we have to take it on trust that he was a great writer. The pre-publicity tacitly gave this away when it said that Goethe was held "by some" to be the world's greatest poet. "Some" means "German speakers", but not even Radio 3 can rely on a working knowledge of German among its listeners any more.

So, to get us worked up about him, the programme makers had to concentrate on his life - which can be a point-missing approach. Still, the biographical tack makes for perfectly good radio. My favourite was Goethe Reborn, which described him, prior to his Italian journey, vegetating in Weimar, his 37th birthday being celebrated by "four priestesses in white, an altar of fame, and" - a particularly chilling detail, this - "addresses from figures representing his unfinished works".

"A man of the world who was once a very famous poet" said one critic. "I thought I was dead", was how Goethe himself put it, suffering also from his relationship with Charlotte von Stein, "married, and more than a little severe; 10 years of it, an educative, unhappily platonic bond". Which, apart from that "married", sounds like the kind of dismal relationships Bertie Wooster was always escaping from by the skin of his teeth.

Talking of cultural figures, regular readers will know that I have been taking particular care to slag off the Today programme on Radio 4 in the past few weeks, to the point where I begin to wonder whether it is not just the atrocious nature of some of the items that is causing my outbursts, but my tendency to hate absolutely everything in the created and uncreated worlds for at least the first couple of hours after awakening.

So it was with some surprise that I noticed that Thursday's programme carried a reasonably substantive appraisal of the French author Celine. This carefully warned us that while he was a genius, he was also a particularly disgusting anti-Semite (but that the two ideas are not, astonishingly, invariably exclusive, a hard notion to swallow with your cornflakes, but an important one); and that there was no point in reading his works in translation.

This is about as highbrow as the Today programme has ever got and to be frank I suspected for a bit that I was still in a pleasant dream. But then an urgent report about the departure of Oasis's bassist came on and I realised I was not. Still, credit where it's due.