Women, women everywhere

We had a long drive back from the north-east last weekend. Six hours or so, including a stop halfway, just past Britain’s most crepuscular town, Grantham. My wife does the driving because she thinks I’ll kill us all. My job is to feed album after album into the car’s admirably old-fashioned CD player. I rarely play more than three or four songs from the same album because my wife gets tetchy and says something like ‘This is too noisy’ or ‘This is boring, change it.’ So I’m kept pretty busy. Every time I remove a CD, the car’s ‘entertainment centre’ reverts to its default position of playing Radio 4.

And here’s the point. We set out at midday. It was five hours before I heard a male voice on Radio 4, when Saturday PM came on. Five hours. We must have heard snatches (an appropriate term, I think) of Radio 4 40 or 50 times and on each occasion it was a woman moaning about something. Moan, moan, moan, all the livelong day. Women were moaning as we passed Thirsk, Selby, Doncaster. They were still moaning at Retford and Newark and Grantham. Their moaning was often afforded succour by the presenter — always female — who did a spot of empathetic moaning alongside them. Marginal moaning, tendentious moaning, gratuitous moaning. A drama with foreign women moaning. A discussion programme with British women moaning. It was ceaseless.

Apparently, some Radio 4 news and current affairs programmes, such as Today, are now required to ensure that at least 50 per cent of their contributors are female, in each show, otherwise the producers get hauled over the coals. This is because the job of these programmes is not to tell us what is going on by reporting the world as it actually is, but to indulge in a spot of social engineering and report the world as its idiotic liberal panjandrums wish it were.