Radio Review: 21 November

When I’m on a full bus or a train, I’m that person. The one who glares meaningfully at the bag on the seat. If the glare doesn’t work, I switch on the sarcasm. ‘Nice of you to buy your bag a ticket,’ I snipe. ‘Is it comfortable? Oh, it doesn’t have a ticket? I do. Shift it.’ Meanwhile, when I offer my seat to someone less able to stand, there’s almost always some swine who tries to cut in. Worse than Mugabe.

Consequently, I listened with horror at the selfish woman who called Julia Hartley-Brewer’s LBC show to say that mummies with buggies full of nappies, changing mats, bottles and (some way behind) babies were a higher priority on public transport than people in wheelchairs. Hartley- Brewer spoke for everyone by asking ‘Are you for real?’, then took down this monstrously entitled creature with a buggy the size of a Range Rover. Fold the buggy, put your baby on your lap, give up the space, Hartley-Brewer advised – but there’s no reasoning with some people and this was one.

From the selfish to those who care ostentatiously… Listening to the Children In Need auction on Chris Evans’s Radio 2 breakfast show last week, I wondered how the bidders had acquired their money. Who in these straitened times has the price of a bungalow on the Fylde coast to chuck away on a pro-celebrity crazy golf beano in the Azores with Jamie Cullum, Elaine Paige and Sally Traffic?

‘So-and-so from Wiltshire’, apparently. Come off it. That doesn’t fool me. You’re clearly an oligarch or a drug baron. Possibly both. Anyway, it doesn’t do to flash your affluence on national radio. Bung the deprived kids a few quid quietly and don’t expect anything in return. That’s the British way.

Julia Hartley-Brewer, LBC, weekdays, 1-4pm. Chris Evans, BBC Radio 2, weekdays, 6.30-9.30am.
Louis on Twitter: @LFBarfe or email: wireless@cheeseford.net