Male fix

The hotly tipped new Men’s Hour programme on Radio 5 Live sounds so 21st century.

The hotly tipped new Men’s Hour programme on Radio 5 Live sounds so 21st century. Its presenter Tim Samuels promises a potent mix of emotional candour (inspired by Tony Soprano’s sessions on the couch) combined with, and I quote, ‘the intelligence’ of Woman’s Hour. So are women at long last truly going to be credited with thinking power and talent while male idols such as Jamie Cullum and José Mourinho are to provide merely therapeutic gravitas? I wish. Read the prospective programme contents, produced by a team from BBC 6 Music, and the seven-part ‘pilot’ could have come straight out of the naughty Nineties, a sort of Men Behaving Badly crossed with Top Gear or an early edition of Loaded magazine. Testicles, sexual power and hypochondria have all been given top billing, with a token woman being allowed on each week to speak her mind (starting off with Jenni Murray of WH).

I’m pretty sure an earlier attempt to provide a male equivalent of Woman’s Hour was dreamt up by Radio 4 about 15 years ago. It lasted I think for about a month before disappearing from the airwaves in a haze of burnt fuel and stale aftershave. But there’s no mention of it anywhere that I can find, not even in David Hendy’s excellent history of the station — perhaps because it was such an embarrassment. Does anyone else remember listening to this or have I imagined it all in a fit of gender-swapping confusion?

Meanwhile, the digital debate is hotting up with letters to the papers pleading with the public not to buy digital sets (notably from the chief executive of one of the commercial local radio networks whose stations at the moment can only be received on FM).