A cat stuck on the end of a vacuum cleaner, Sally Mugnusson's fluffy bits and a right old ding-dong about whether local radio is "crap" with the BBC's Pat Loughrey. It can only be one thing - the opening session of the Radio Festival in Glasgow.
It has now become traditional - well, for two years in a row, anyway - to open the festival with a debate, and this year's theme was localness. Or, in the words of the motion for the GMG debate: "This house... likes it local."
It is a hot topic too, with radio groups such as GCap Media owner Global Radio ditching local DJs in favour of syndicated programmes across large networks of stations. It helps to compete with the BBC, see? Oh, and it's also cheaper.
Anyway, Pat Loughrey mounted an impassioned defence of localness, as you would expect - he is the BBC's director of nations and regions.
He quoted a Google executive who said people care about two things - global and local. We want to know about oil prices and the latest from Iraq, but we also want to know about our public transport and whether we will be able to get to work in the morning. I think he's got it spot on.
Loughrey accused people in the media of not realising the importance of localness to people's lives. "People in the media don't appreciate it," he said.
Certainly author and journalist Anvar Khan is not keen. Speaking against the motion, she said local news was "rubbish... made for your granny sitting in a home waiting to die". Charming.
Khan said people weren't interested in the man who stepped in a puddle in Dundee - I think that's her example of local news.
She also mentioned another example, of an incident where the fire brigade had to use a vacuum cleaner with a sock over the end to rescue a cat stuck in a drain. Now I'm not kidding, but that sounds fascinating. Which is exactly why I love local news.
But as Robert Beveridge, a lecturer at Edinburgh's Napier University points out, it's all very well loving local, but who's going to pay for it? "Authority, credibility and trust is not achieved by cost cutting," he warns.
Stewart Lockhead is a community radio broadcaster and chair of Leith FM. He says if local radio wants to survive then it has to have personalities who know the area they are broadcasting to. And they have to do more than simply introduce the next record.
"Radio without speech is not radio, it's a jukebox. And Apple does a better jukebox than you," Lockhead cautions.
Lockhead adds that it's "outrageous" that Edinburgh has no local radio. In fact, the whole of Scotland has BBC Radio Scotland and, outside of the islands, that's it. He wants to top slice the licence fee and use it to fund lots more small local radio stations.
"There are more than 100 community broadcasters across the UK, most of them broadcasting without public sector support. Community broadcasting might be small, but it might just save you," he tells the audience of radio execs.
Broadcaster Peter Curran - you might have heard him on Radio 4 - is also here. He has a great line about the "tangy combination of bitterness and gratitude" of former national DJs who end up on local radio. "Name names!" bellows a chap from the audience. He doesn't.
Pat Kane's on the panel too, I should add. He used to be in a pop group called Hue and Cry. In fact, he still is - they have a new album out in September.
Over to the floor, and Pat Loughrey starts getting a bit of grief from a chap in the audience who tells him local radio is "crap". I think he's actually from BBC Radio Scotland, so it should make for an interesting chat over the water cooler if they meet one day soon.
Pat has heard enough, telling Tony Currie - he does the overnight show on BBC Radio Scotland, by the way - it shows a "profound disdain" for the 10 million people who tune into local radio.
"It is a bourgeois sneer that has no place here," thunders Loughrey. Currie has a pop back, but to be honest it all gets a little confused. Perhaps they can finish this one off in the bar.
The final result - 186 in favour of the motion, 28 against. Sally Magnusson, by the way, was chairing the debate, and her "fluffy bits" was a reference to the fluffy story at the end of a news bulletin. But then, you never thought it was anything else, did you?
