Thankyou BBC

I’ve just been listening to “Afternoon Play: Pips” (BBC Radio 4), a wonderfully perceptive gentle comedy set in a dentist’s waiting room. The action was carried through a series of internal monologues, occasionally interspersed with dialogue; Glyn Houston as the Professor really captured the vulnerability of a recently widowed burnt-out academic and, his sense of frailty and mortality was beautifully balanced by the revelling in her own fecundity of Dr Powell, a former colleague. Although the play was set at a dental surgery, the only thing that set my teeth on edge was the top and tailing song, as James Blunt nasally whined “ … yow-er bew-ooo-ti-ful”!

This play, along with Monday’s “The Fortunestown Kid” and Wednesday’s “The Discourse of Two Once-Young Women” have once more served to remind me just what an excellent service the BBC provides.