You only needed to watch the animated trailer for Darkside – that's right, a trailer, with images, for radio. What madness is this? – to know it was going to be totally off its box. A toy farmer stood staring at the skies; giant angle grinders sliced up the earth; a figure sat on a hospital bed with a massive propeller where his head should be.
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Regular Radio 4 listeners will already know The Reunion, the programme that has been picking at old scabs and offering moist-eyed snapshots of times gone by since 2006. It's about revisiting crowning glories and ghastly calamities of old, with the wonderful, and sometimes awful, benefit of hindsight. Like Desert Island Discs, it has a distinct format: a group of people are brought together to recall a shared moment in their lifetimes. Unlike DID, however, there is more scope for sadness, for joy, or for sheer, red-faced fury.
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We're now into week two of the mid-summer period known as "the radio doldrums." If you need to know more about this annual event, may I please refer you to last week's column in which I whined at length about holidaying presenters leaving their shows in the hands of imbeciles, and about all the dreadful-sounding programmes I had declined to listen to for fear that I might slip into a radio-induced coma.
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This is an abominable time of year for the radio listener. Early August is when the big-name presenters pack up and sod off to the Seychelles, leaving their shows in the hands of the unqualified and confused. It's a time when the interns run riot, and when producers press the big button marked "pre-recorded tat" and disappear off for a nap.
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