Radio Head

It was Marc Riley on BBC 6 Music (nightly, from 7pm) who blew this gaff wide open. "Marc's brown as a berry from his hols," it said on the info bit on the front of my digital radio, and since that evening (which was Monday), I couldn't do anything else constructive, I thought I'd have a look on the webcam. Brown as a berry? Impossible to tell. Back from his hols, even? Hard to say. You couldn't make out who they were. You could just see the top of three blokes, sitting stock still, in a mess, with headphones on. Women walk away from civilization to forge a life in forests, trying to escape this view. Riley welcomed on Lazarus and Grantura, though I'm afraid I can't tell you whether that's one band, two bands collaborating, one band with a song or two songs. "You've been described as six spectacularly ordinary-looking blokes," he said to them - slightly flirtatiously, if I may venture. Well, they must have a picture of this, surely? It's a webcam. We can't look at these three scalps all night. Not when there are six more ordinary-looking blokes we could view right there.

Nothing - not a thing. About an hour later, there was a different angle and some men standing up. I don't know if they were the same men, but since I didn't know who the first lot were, this in no way interfered with my state of ignorance. All I know is that nobody here is as brown as a berry. Why lie?

Maybe the web camera man has gone home. Odd hours. Doesn't he realize the show starts at 7pm? But to give it the benefit, I went to Mark Radcliffe, who's doing Radcliffe and Maconie on his ownio (R2). Thrills are slightly thinner, here, where there is only the top of one man's head, with headphones, sitting in a mess, and it's not even Radcliffe, it's Mike Harding from the Cambridge Folk Festival (I'm just guessing that from his shiny, folk-festive pate). Seriously, you radioers. The webcam has been around a long time, now. You either need to come up with a point to it, stop doing it, or tidy up your studios.