Monday Evening Musings

After I was invited to be a contributor to this blog, it struck me I'd been letting my Radio Four listening slip a bit in recent weeks. Catching up with the latest ludicrous adventures of Jack Bauer and Gregory House (not together, but I would definitely watch that) and listening to little more than the Today programme on my radio alarm clock, something that resulted in a continuous hazy knowledge of the day's news, which I'd forget altogether until someone mentioned it later in the day and I'd suddenly recall it all.

Anyway, this evening was a chance to catch up a bit. I started with the seminal Clue, which was in Manchester this week- good as always but nothing out of the ordinary. Am I the only one who doesn't think swanee kazoo is funny? Next up was The Archers. I do not listen to The Archers, and as more and more people I know succumb to the Ambridge Curse I'm taking extra care to avoid its dubious charms before doubtless plunging into a grateful numbing addiction at a later stage. Tonight, a man was trying to persuade another man to put a thing in the farm that turns rubbish into electricity. Also, there was a grumpy old man in a wheelchair being slightly less grumpy to someone and talking about coffee. I'm still not sensing the appeal here.

At 7.15 Front Row- Mark Lawson being slightly insufferable. Apparently A N Wilson thought the film of The Golden Compass was very good, and wondered how they trained all the animals until "they began to speak and I started to think they might not be real". The CGI, whilst fooling A N, was below Mark's standard however. The Spice Girls sounded the same as they always had in Vancouver, and there was an interview with Dennis Hopper. The best bit of this programme was a discussion around a new Gibson Robot automatic self tuning guitar. This sounded good to me- it was a bit like Tomorrow's World- but predictably some guitarists might not like it. Except all the ones they interviewed seemed to love it. As far as I'm concerned, one of the greatest types of guitar is the one that has a keyboard where the strings should be, so maybe I'm biased.

Part two shortly...