Assault on the ears

Does anyone ever listen to Radio 4’s Moral Maze on Saturday nights? It is only the repeat edition (the live discussion happens on Wednesday nights), but even so why broadcast such a deliberately discomfiting programme at almost bedtime on the most mellow night of the week? It’s such an odd mismatch. There you are, winding down, daring to relax as you clear the last bits of washing-up before going to bed, only to find yourself blasted into thoughts you’d rather not have by the testy, tetchy tones of Melanie and Michael debating (with their presumably willing victims) the whys and wherefores of private schools, Nimbys, or gastric-band surgery on the NHS.

This week the team (under Michael Buerk’s baton) were looking at ‘the morality of poverty’. The debate was halfway through when I switched on and caught them talking about City bonuses and the ‘cruel’ damage that’s been done to people by the welfare system created in the 1940s by Williams Temple and Beveridge. One of the victims/witnesses declared that ‘some people’s work is not worth very much’. At which point I switched off — to save the wireless from imminent destruction. Any other slot in the schedule and I might have listened on, to discover what the justification for such a provocatively immoral statement could be. But at that time of night you can’t be expected to reason; the brain is just not up to it.

Of course, in a 24/7 society, programme scheduling is not nearly as important as it used to be. One person’s weekend off is another’s weekend on. The latest listening figures also show that more and more of us are choosing when we listen and where, on the internet, by smartphone, as a podcast, download, via iPlayer.