Comfort station

Sometimes when listening to Radio Four you can have the odd experience of spiralling downwards into your very own time warp. Lying in the bath on Sunday morning, for instance, with the radio warbling in the background, you could almost pretend you were back in the 1970s (except that the cork tiles and avocado finish will probably have been swapped for upmarket granite and stainless steel, and the miniature transistor for a digital Bose). At ten, there’s The Archers omnibus edition (floruit 1954), followed by Desert Island Discs (fl. 1944) and Just a Minute (fl. 1974). It’s very comforting, knowing that there are bits of life where nothing has changed, there’s been no makeover, even if you have to turn down the volume when The Archers theme tune tum-ti-tums its way on to the airwaves so that your ultra-cool neighbours never find out your guilty secret. But what does a young audience make of these throwbacks to programmes that were on the air before their parents were born, which could once be heard in that lost Eden of power cuts and wildcat strikes, of Angel Delight and glam rock? Wouldn’t they rather listen to the relentlessly upbeat, chip-chop style of those Big Toe children’s slots on BBC7?

Nope, say Tom and Will. My pre-teen nephews tell me that their favourite radio programmes are Just a Minute and I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, neither of which have changed one bit since their first airing in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Not a whiff of restructuring or rebranding. Not even an updating of the signature tune. It’s the triumph of another kind of PC thinking — pre-corporate, pre-change-because-it’s-good-for-you not because-it-makes-sense. And a vindication of age — both the chairmen, Nicholas Parsons and Humphrey Lyttelton, are well past retirement and yet they can still make a ten-year-old laugh.