Caught by the fuzz ... Doherty and friends. Photograph: AP
When Pete Doherty was asked about the worst aspects of his 29-day stay in Wormwood Scrubs, he replied "Gangsters, and Radio 4."
Given that he was inside a prison, Doherty might have expected to meet a few criminals. But the fact that he was forced to share a cell with the voices of Radio 4 is beyond cruel and unusual. If I were Doherty, I would be on the next plane to the Hague.
What is it about Radio 4 that makes it so unbearable? Every time I hear the sound of a day-time presenter chew on a repressed chuckle, I have to assume that they laughing at me. They certainly aren't laughing with me, because I have my head jammed in a door trying to prise my ears away from the side of my skull. Listening to Radio 4, I feel like one of the actors in the Afternoon Play, forever walking in circles in a tray of gravel, slowly descending to the seventh circle of a soporific hell.
Before Doherty spoke for the suffering millions, I thought my hatred of Radio 4 was rooted in childhood trauma. My grandmother fell to sleep to Book at Bedtime, grinding her dentures to dust as the storytellers delivered acres of middlebrow prose in RSC iambic pentameter. Over breakfast, my father automatically tuned to Thought for the Day, with its daily homily to Radio 4's non-denominational God and a religion that, we were assured, was very much like a five-day Test Match (insert own strained metaphorical comparison, here).
My mother loved The Archers. As a teenager, nursing my weekly Sunday morning binge-drinking hangover, I learnt there was no worse sound than the Archers theme tune blaring through a bedroom door. In the north of England, we are proud that our ancestors dragged themselves out of the mud to embrace the industrial revolution. True, they spent 18-hour days in sunless factories as cotton dust ate their lungs. But they rejoiced because they had left the land and escaped the cowpat-gargling yokels that snuffle through it. Now Radio 4 was bringing the stench of feudalism back into our proud Northern home, and my mother was collaborating.
On paper, I am perfect material for Radio 4. I am middle-aged, middle class, literate, news-orientated and liberal. Unfortunately, I am the wrong type of middle-aged, middle class, literate, news-orientated liberal. I am both too provincial and too cosmopolitan for Radio 4's bizarre parallel world. Above all, I am lacking a lobotomy. But I should show more sympathy. When I think of the BBC mole-people, toiling in the weird gloom of Broadcasting House, I should reflect. They are as much prisoners as Pete Doherty ever was. Bent-backed and isolated from the world, they are imprisoned by the dullness and slowness that makes them unsuitable for television.
