WHAT OUR WRITERS THINK

What I expect from Radio 4 is reliable distraction during household chores: Round Britain Quiz while unloading the washing machine; In Our Time

while mending a puncture.

Increasingly, that’s not what I get. As a consequence, I dive for Radio 3 to avoid Lauren Laverne’s Desert Island Discs or Grace Dent on The Untold.

Radio 4 has become a parody of public-service propaganda. Comedians do not have to be funny as long as they’re diverse. The straightforward is presented with an ulterior motive. And it is often not far to find. Red Letter Days promised to discover why 50th birthdays are particularly rated. That sounded interesting. But it only took 17 seconds for Julie Hesmondhalgh, who played the first transgender character in Coronation Street, to start going on about an actor who revealed to her friends on her 50th that she was a trans woman. Surprise!

A genuinely fascinating story was presented by the engaging Jane Garvey in her series Life Changing .Itwasan interview with a man who fell off a roof and saw, on the way down, a vision of his future, including children and a skill in playing a musical instrument he couldn’t even name. This was Tony Kofi, now a jazz saxophonist. It happened that he was from a Ghanaian family living in Nottingham. I am not asking the white working class to fall off the roofs and take up jazz, but if they did, in droves, how many would get on Radio 4?

It’s not just gender fluidity and racial discrimination. The Archers is now a nexus of gay surrogacy, historical child abuse and rewilding.

The big bad future for Radio 4 is here already: as a ragbag of podcasts. You can tell a podcast by everyone talking at once. Greg Jenner’s You’re Dead to Me history half-hour is In Our Time in a bus station waiting room.

And so on Radio 4, I am not entertained, educated or informed, but bored, nannied and annoyed.