You and Yours
Radio 4

On You and Yours (weekdays, noon) - just moments before Nick Clegg's website crashed under the deluge - investigations were under way over which laws we most want to see scrapped. Prowling the lobby of Broadcasting House looking for people to quiz, a reporter said quietly, almost to herself, "I really, really, really want to ask a famous person. Somebody really, really, really famous . . . oh look! There's Simon Mayo!" Heat's "Torso of the Week" said he'd like something done about the tennis. Next, Fi Glover was stopped and she insisted the whole initiative was ridiculous, since government was like a pizza delivery service. "And I expect them to bring the pizzas to me."

Even for You and Yours - known privately within the BBC as Moans and Moaners - this was low-cal, polyunsaturated stuff with a particularly heavy undertow of Islington tension. But at least, back in the studio, Winifred Robinson sounds permanently peeved - preferable to the horrible way other presenters suck up to one another when they go on to plug their shows. "Oh Melvyn, how lovely to see you as usual," says John Hmph; "Oh Fi, so glad you're back," gurgles Sandi Toksvig - as though identifying each other as foreign nationals grounded amid alien hordes at a distant airport.

Yes, thank God for Winifred, slitting her eyes, draw-stringing her throat and championing those of us whose peyote cactuses from Homebase have suddenly turned mutant. Later (8 July, 2.15pm), a play about Cardinal John Henry Newman starred Derek Jacobi as the great man, and opened with him in his tomb, hearing the scrabble of the diggers in 2008 as they sought to exhume the coffin and remove his remains in advance of his possible canonisation - in the process wresting him from the company of his life companion, Father Ambrose St John, long buried next to him.

Should Newman's wishes to stay put for eternity be overturned? What was the priests' relationship? How does one keep Peter Tatchell left of the buffer zone? Oh, you know, all the usual stuff - and the conclusion was undramatic. That Ambrose and Newman enjoyed nothing more sexy than do the Ancient Norse and Weelkes professors in a standard M R James, travelling to play golf together in Suffolk, etc.

More interesting is the mystery of what happened to Newman's remains. I recently had a conversation about this with my parents - my father being the secretary of the Newman Association, I was hoping he was party to some juicy information. But he merely confirmed that there was indeed nothing significant - nothing that could be described as a first-class relic anyway - of Newman left in his coffin, nor indeed of Ambrose in his, the coffins having been made of wood, and buried in the damp.

Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. "What about his teeth?" asked my mother, suspiciously. "No teeth." "But even Tutankhamun left his teeth. Even at the death camps there were teeth!"

“No teeth." This rather gets on my mother's nerves. "Wouldn't have been much of a relic anyway," she sniffs. "Just teeth, in a box, to venerate." Far less preferable, was the inference, than a thigh bone, or the withered hand of the martyred St John Southworth in Westminster Cathedral, the remains of whose drawn and quartered body are laid out inside robes small enough to fit the dolls I cut out of my Bunty annual. And as usual, my mother is right. Not much dignity in teeth. Not much moral uplift. So soon it passeth away, and we are gone.