Radio column: Animal magic

What did George Orwell ever do for us? I mean besides giving us TV's Big Brother, in which fame-hungry nobodies lie around on designer furniture picking their toenails, and Room 101, in which fame-hungry nearly-nobodies prattle on about stuff that gets on their wick. We're probably only a commissioning meeting away from a reality series in which the cast of TOWIE are dressed up as four-legged creatures and sent to work on a farm, under the über-strict gaze of Sir Alan Sugar's Napoleon.
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Radio column: The big chill

How badly are you feeling the chill? Have goose pimples lent your skin the texture of a cheese-grater? Have your eyeballs frozen over and your nipples retreated inwards? Are you wearing so many layers of clothing that the only thing that separates you from the crazy bird lady in Mary Poppins is, well, the birds? 
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Radio column: Grief encounter

Death weighed heavily on the radio this week. Well, why wouldn't it? It's January, it's cold out, the boiler's packed up, train fares have rocketed, pensions are being slashed, the Coalition's still in charge and next Monday is, we're told, the most depressing day of the year. Life bloody sucks.
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Radio column: Saturday morning fever

"In another life I would have been out on the road DJing and dragging a record box around in the middle of the night in some shady club," remarked Mary Anne Hobbs at the start of her new weekend breakfast show on BBC6 Music.

Hobbs was referring to her last job as a club DJ, one of her many working incarnations that have also included Sounds journalist, Radio 1 Breezeblock stalwart and presenter on XFM. In recent years, when most people her age are putting the kettle on and warming up the telly in readiness for Saturday Kitchen, Hobbs has been packing up the decks, waving goodbye to the boggle-eyed masses and crawling home to her bed.

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Radio column: Firecrackers and fur coats

"Are you looking for a job?" James Naughtie asked Dame Ann Leslie on Radio 4's Today, a note of panic in his voice. Now there's an idea. As one of the programme's guest editors, Leslie, the veteran foreign correspondent who famously went to war in a fur coat, arrived like a blast of cold air in a sticky sauna. You can imagine plenty of previous guests proffering feature ideas cobbled together by their agents, but not Leslie. She was first in the office, her sleeves rolled up and ready to kick some serious butt.
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