Shirley Williams could out-argue Sue and Dave any day. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
If you're older than Sue and Dave, don't bother ringing. BBC local radio stations would rather you didn't take part in their phone-ins. You may, in the words of one BBC memo, be too "squeaky-voiced". Sue and Dave are in their mid-50s. He's a self-employed plumber and she's a school secretary, and both have children from previous marriages, and they're still, you'll be glad to hear, a "young thinking" couple. Or would be if they existed, rather than being mere figments of BBC lucubrations based on communing with focus groups.
The managing director of BBC Radio Solent put them into producers' and presenters' vocabularies at the end of last year with a memo saying she didn't want too many elderly voices on air. If you're doing caller round-ups, she said, make sure you target Sue and Dave. They haven't yet invented an emblem couple of folks to avoid, but you know what they mean. Let us call them Mabel and Reg. They are 10 years older than Sue and Dave, so their voices may now sound querulous, and of course, being old, they'll complain. You know what we old folks are like. "If you are not careful," a "senior BBC source" told the Daily Telegraph, "then phone-ins are populated by elderly people, and that may not be the most simulating radio." "We are still there for our older listeners," another BBC source wheedled. "So long as they keep their mouths shut," perhaps he murmured under his breath.
Were I to complain about this, I would argue that old age is relative and overtakes some people sooner than others. I know people in Sue and Dave's age group whose capacity for stimulating talk is less than that of others I know who are 90. There are people now in the House of Commons who've been 60 since they were 40, and others who are still 40 at 60. Recently, I heard Shirley Williams, whom the BBC have not yet barred from appearing on Any Questions, out-talking and out-arguing the rest of the company - though the record books say she is 76. Elsewhere, the broadcasters seem anxious to deploy elderly people complaining, in their roles of grumpy old men and grumpy old women. Still, as far as caller round-ups go, if you want to hear what Mabel and Reg think of the world, you're likely to be disappointed. Never mind: you can always tune into the parliamentary channel and hear your contemporaries spouting away in the House of Lords.
And it's good to see the complaints that reached the ears of the telegraph have come from producers and presenters themselves, not from us aged persons. It is even distinctly possible ... but I think I must leave it there. It is Monday evening, and I don't want to miss my Monday night fixes, Just A Minute, ebulliently chaired by Nicholas Parsons, 83, followed by The Best of Jazz, presented as it has been for many years by Humphrey Lyttelton, whom the BBC may not have noticed is now 85.
