Anyone who has heard the new Saturday morning show with Ian Wright and Mark Bright on Radio 5, Wright and Bright, knows that the former footballing colleagues at Crystal Palace usually fall over each other to get a word in edgeways. But on the occasion of the recent death of the former Arsenal midfielder David Rocastle, from cancer at the age of 33, there was a discernible difference.

"Er . [...]

Back in the Fifties when I used to waltz clumsily around the floor of the Tower Ballroom, New Brighton, wishing that Bill Gregson and his "broadcasting orchestra" would disappear in a puff of smoke and be replaced by Duke Ellington or Count Basie, I derived some minor comfort from contemplating a large sign on a pillar next to the stage, which simply read: "No Jitterbugging". I had no clear idea [...]

"Edwina Currie has a brass neck, a silver tongue and a golden pen." Julian Critchley's carefully honed compliment to the woman who ran Margaret Thatcher a close second in Radio 4's Woman of the Year poll back in 1988 sounded a trifle hollow when he announced the first item on a recent Late Night Currie show on Radio 5 Live as another look at the "foot-and-out mouthbreak".

According to a [...]

Radio 4 producers still chatter nostalgically about the times when you could have a bright idea for a programme, pop into the controller's office, make a brief pitch, and then walk away with a straight yes or no. That was long before the invention of the new commissioning process, which involves sufficient paperwork and layers of decision-making to suggest that one is not so much asking permission to make a [...]

I have had some excellent rows in my life, and have come up with one or two devastating last lines, but I've not yet mastered the art of slamming the door behind me. At times, I've even allowed myself to think that the somewhat complex emotional life I endured in York for nearly 25 years might well have been more orderly, and considerably less indeterminate, if only my capacity to [...]

Although the members of our little group are rather good on the populist political implications of the fuel crisis and the pseudo-relationships engendered by Big Brother, we're not so hot when it comes to dealing with the death and terminal illness that overtakes our parents from time to time.

Part of the problem is our thoroughgoing individualism. We are so committed to the idea that we are creatures of our [...]

It was a typical enough Sunday morning: six of us sitting around in Geoff's backyard, reading our way through a mound of morning papers and trying to outdo each other's moans of exasperation. Mike had been entertaining us with a particularly absurd paragraph from a lifestyle supplement about how one could turn one's bathroom into a social area by placing a bottle of brandy in the toothbrush cabinet and fitting [...]

Sarah has let us all down. Only a week after we had agreed that she would be a valuable member of our fortnightly dining club, she turned up at our planning meeting in The George and casually announced that she had decided to become a Christian.

Geoff could hardly contain his exasperation. "But only a couple of years ago, you were running around telling everyone that you were a [...]

For some time now, Stewart Hickman has been gripped by the absurd belief that he bears an uncanny resemblance to Harold Pinter. I hadn't realised quite how far matters had gone until Sally told me over lunch in Cafe Flo last week that he'd not only begun to dress like the distinguished dramatist, but was attempting to further the resemblance by speaking in short, laconic sentences, as well as professing [...]

After roughly 3,000 hours of intense tuition in such diverse pedagogic settings as a secondary school in Liverpool, evening classes at the City Lit and conversational practice with Martine in the privacy of my own home, I am now more or less able to make myself understood at the cheese counter of an average French supermarket.

I haven't reached the advanced stage where I can ask the names or [...]