Pop quiz, bonus question, half a dozen beer tokens up for grabs: which radio station plays a better mix of music from today and yesterday, pumping out the same 200 records again and again until either your ears bleed and scab over or you pass out, whichever blessed act occurs first?, writes Paul Smith.
If you scribbled down the name of a local commercial station, you've just lost out on six cloudy pints of beer and that peculiar-yet-familiar aftertaste of cleaning fluid.
The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is BBC Local Radio - 40 years old yesterday.
BBC4's Nation On Film: Local Radio At 40 revealed the origins of the early incarnations of now familiar stations.
In those innocent days of black and white wireless, a station cost £50,000 a year to operate, as opposed to £2.5m today.
Determined to do whatever it took to find an audience, these embryonic services would broadcast anything to everyone, from on-air keep-fit to budgie talking contests. But only if the archaic, pre-second world war transmitters worked that week and the curiously shambolic staff figured out what they were meant to be doing.
Four decades on, and BBC Local Radio is a very different animal, having grown from eight experimental stations to the 40 local services that now serve communities across the land.
Far from inviting all ages to listen, the BBC Trust is very clear of what they expect from local radio, insisting "the target audience should be listeners aged 50 and over, who are not well-served elsewhere".
However, 50 year olds are very well served; they fall within the target audience of every commercial AC - adult contemporary - station in the country. It's the older demographics that commercial groups shy away from, believing them to be difficult to monetise effectively.
Then consider the population of the UK: 12 million residents - that's 1 in 5 - are over 60 and half of these are over 70. Sounds like BBC Local Radio should be producing programmes for 60 and 70 year olds to truly satisfy the trust's criteria. So why don't they?
They don't have to, is the rather pointed answer. Pensioners are vagrants on the radio dial, with no station to call home. BBC Radio can target listeners 20 years younger because they have a largely captive audience of elderly listeners; they've nowhere else to go.
Listening to these stations will confirm this. You'll find most local radio clichés present and accounted for - clichés are clichés after all, because they're true - with elderly listeners up in arms about rationing, corporal punishment and my particular favourite: dog fouling.
But these days only a couple of hundred songs are played during daytime hours - the majority no more than 40 years old - and many specialist shows catering for older listeners have been shelved in recent years. My local station regularly plays ten songs an hour during the afternoon, hardly in keeping with the trust's expectations of "60% speech during core (daytime) hours".
The BBC is pursuing their prey with the tools of the commercial radio trade: focus groups, auditorium testing and target listener profiling. The Beeb may not be interested in the advertising revenue of their commercial brethren, but the battle for audiences is bloodier than ever, the result of an ever-increasing demand to contribute towards the BBC's overall reach.
What will the following 40 years have in store for these stations? Will BBC Local Radio be relevant in the future? Is it today? What would you miss if the transmitters fell silent tomorrow?
