Holiday... celebrate

On darker days, you may find me hunched over the dial on my digital Roberts Radio searching for a parallel broadcasting universe where the people who cover holiday leave for regular presenters actually present those programmes all the time.

This week I've been not working in someone else's office, but at home, busy writing The Miss Jones Memoirs (Deluxe Edition) – A Life In Lambswool. While staring into the middle distance, and sharpening and resharpening my pencils, I've been listening to Liza Tarbuck and Mark Radcliffe cover for SteveWrightInTheAfternoon on Radio 2. As some of you know, I would marry Mark Radcliffe, were he to ask, so you can imagine how happy I was to have him in my spare room chatting away of an afternoon, as if he were there in person knocking me up some shelves. I'm not familiar with SteveWrightInTheAfternoon's 'act' these days, but I'm reluctant to believe it has evolved sufficiently since the late 80s to better Mark Radcliffe enthusing about Leonard Cohen and Liza Tarbuck being more entertaining than almost any other female presenter on the radio without her raising a sweat/a sneer/her hemline/other.  Similarly, it is a happy, happy day when Adam and Joe present the 6 Music Breakfast Show, as they sometimes do when Shaun Keavney is away. Unfortunately my holidays coincide with Keavney's uncannily often – enough to make me wonder if I am actually married to him without somehow realising. And I return to work, and to early-a.m. radio, only to hear Keavney's taunting thank you to A&J for their stand-in services.

But naturally there is never pleasure without profound and grinding pain. And in this broadcasting Butlin's, Ruth Langford and Eamonn Holmes present This Morning. Forever. Less your shangri-la, more shangri-aaaarrgggghhhhhhhhh...