Never Retune

If you have Radio 4 as your default radio station, don't be tempted to see what's on other channels. Not even to escape from Money Box.

At Saturday lunchtime, trapped by the grill because I was making an unusually complicated lunch of cheese and tomatoes on toast, I could take no more of Money Box and switched to Five.
I almost dropped the grill pan as the sports presenter said: "Let's get some homo-eroticism going in the studio."

I do not, of course, have anything against homo-eroticism. But there's a time and place for everything. And I don't want homo-eroticism shoved down my throat when I'm salivating at the prospect of cheese on toast with a light drizzle of Worcester sauce.
A gaggle of sportsmen and pundits were invited to nominate the hottest hunks in sport. Cue lots of laddish guffaws and this classic preamble: "I have an unblemished record of thirty years of heterosexuality......."

I began to ponder how you asess the sexual attractiveness of a gender to whom you are not attracted. Yet straight men often do this in a jokey, grudging way. "He's a good-looking bastard, isn't he?" they will say of a footballer.
I've always found it rather more problematic. At a business lunch when I was in my twenties, someone asked me: "Are you a tit man or a leg man?" When I hesitated, taking a swig of wine and praying that the fire alarm would go off, my indecision was mis-interpreted. Someone else said: "He's a tit man and a leg man! The lucky bastard!"
I chuckled knowingly, intimating that my catholic tastes concerning the female body had been rumbled.
But then a third suit, more perspicacious than the others, spoiled everything by saying to me: "I hope we're not putting you off your lunch."

By the time I was putting myself on the outside of four rounds of melted cheese on toast, I had tired of Radio Five's game of 'let's pretend we can identity the hottest hunks in sport whilst making it clear that we wouldn't under any circumstances give them one and have never for a nano-second had any doubts about our own 100% heterosexuality.'
So I switched to Radio 2 and the Jonathan Ross show.

Some of Ross's witty banter would be the perfect accompaniment to a light, savoury lunch.
Ross was describing his colonoscopy. In graphic detail.
"They shoved a camera up my jacksy."
It wasn't a messy procedure, he assured us, because his jacksy was as clean as a whistle.
I sprang towards the radio dial like a greyhound leaving the traps, knocking a pepper mill and a Worcester sauce bottle to the floor.
You know what? That Money Box isn't such a bad programme.
Better to drown in an alphabet soup of HIPs and ISAs than have your lunch ruined by images of Beckham's Brazilian or Ross's colon.