Radio Valerie Grove

Mr Betjeman’s Class featured the final performance by the actor Benjamin Whitrow – who, apart from being the best-ever Mr Bennet, could capture Betjeman’s voice perfectly.

In the first of Jonathan Smith’s duo of plays, JB related how, sent down from Oxford, he was hired by a prep school in Cockfosters to teach English and, despite an aversion to all sport, supervise cricket.

At 22, the eccentric Mr B was daring and subversive. His electrifying readingsaloud, waving his arms or sometimes lying on the floor, imparted a passion for poetry; though sacked after a year, he was never forgotten by the boys.

Hopelessly unsuited to taking over the family firm of Betjemann & Son, manufacturers of the Tantalus, he was estranged from Ernest, his bourgeois father, who was baffled by him.

JB could not possibly explain to Ernest that his tutor, C S Lewis, failed him because he disliked him; nor confess that his favourite activity at Marlborough was not rugger but drama, dressing up as Maria the maid or Mrs Teazle; nor that he was undecided which way to swing, until he kissed Penelope Chetwode on the lips – which proved ‘I must have been a bit heter’ – and married her.

They were not reconciled when his father died suddenly. ‘The truth is,

I disappointed him,’ says Betjeman, adding, ‘As for me and my son – that’s another story.’ What became of JB’S son, Paul, was duly told in Mr Betjeman Regrets, broadcast the next day with the voices of both Whitrow – who died during the recording – and Robert Bathurst, who took over the part: as I write, I haven’t yet heard this unique hybrid, but it deserves a salute.

I had a spare ticket for a double recording of Just a Minute; so, by setting a competition on the Oldie blog, we found a reader, David Higham, to be my blind date. I spotted him at once in the fifteenth-floor coffee bar of the Saint Georges Hotel in Langham Place: a lone, white-haired gent. After a warm greeting, I reproached him for not wearing a tie, as he’d promised. The gent looked utterly perplexed – at which point, the real Mr Higham, sporting a tie and carrying the latest Oldie, materialised. He proved an excellent companion – he lives in a house delightfully named Popinjays Warehouse – and we had a v jolly time in the front row of the BBC Radio Theatre, laughing like mad at the repartee of Paul Merton, Stephen Fry, Gyles Brandreth and Jan Ravens. Truly vintage editions – every bit as good as the ‘mash-up’ that went out on Christmas Day for the fiftieth anniversary, which cleverly spliced together all the stars’ classic performances, including the late-lamented Linda Smith, Kenneth Williams and Peter Cook.

When the broadcasting awards are made this spring, I suspect that Radio 3’s Sacred River will be a winner – even though it was an almost voiceless six hours: Neil Macgregor’s compilation of the music of worship. From Bach and Tallis to Tavener, with bells, dervishes, mantras, plainchant and drumbeat. Alas, download time has expired. The BBC would be mad not to release a double CD.

Last month, I said I preferred writers to read their own work on Book of the Week – and hearing Blowers booming out his cricket reminiscences, which nobody else could possibly have delivered, confirmed my conviction. By contrast, Sir Derek Jacobi’s RP was all wrong for Laurie Lee’s irreversibly rustic Gloucestershire in Village Christmas. But Eleanor Bron, reading from Cooking in a Bedsitter, caught Katharine Whitehorn’s vintage Roedean perfectly.

Nostalgic praise for Ed Stourton’s Auntie’s War. George Bernard Shaw taunted the BBC for cowering to Hitler by shutting down everything except Sandy Macpherson’s endless organ, and ‘news bulletins without enough news to fill them’. Plus ça change.