Thought For The Day

I drive to work, and have done for the last twenty years.

During that time I have worked my way through most of the local and national radio stations. I have worked my way through educational tapes (at one time playing the eleven double sided tapes of Chet Karass's Negotiating Skills course several times) and endless music selections. Somehow I always come back to BBC Radio 4. It's not ideal but it has quite a lot going for it: it is human speech (so it engages the brain) but not the frenetic bonhomie and endless competitions of various breakfast shows, there are no adverts, and it is an introduction to the day's news without having to sit down with a paper.

It has some drawbacks though. It is frustrating to listen to an item about a topic which I have some knowledge of or interest in, and hear a couple of 'experts' (likely selected on the basis of their willingness to get up at some awful hour of the morning) introduce, examine and debate a complex subject in about three minutes then, just when it starts to get somewhere, have the presenter cut in with "Well we will have to leave it there..."

It is also tedious to listen to well-briefed and trained politicians ignoring the questions they are being asked and simply rehearsing a prepared text (you listening, Gordon?).

But the major problem is that I am driven to get to work by 7.50 at the latest in order to avoid having to listen to Thought For The Day. Yes I know I can turn it off but that feels like defeat. I know it is going on in the silence, polluting the radio landscape just beyond my hearing.

It is dreadful (with the occasional exception of a half decent thought from the editor of the Sikh Messenger). It is Private Eye's Rev J C Flannel made corporeal. I feel my brain being submerged in a ceaseless tide of meaningless mush. I can feel my eyes glazing over, synapses snapping under the strain of trying to process the meandering ponderings.

I can cope with that.

What I cannot cope with is Anne Atkins. I do not know what it is about this emotionally stunted intellectual pigmy woman that sets my blood pressure soaring. Maybe it is the leaden, amateurish attempts at humour, the clunking sarcasm, or the strangled, bitter bigotry that oozes over the radio waves. Maybe that's normal on her planet, but I find it spoils my whole day. She is a one-woman container of all that is bad and unpleasant about Christianity.

There was a fuss some time ago about whether non-religious people had any thoughts to contribute to the start of the day, and the BBC concluded that they didn't.

The problem is that the religious commentators don't either.