Here is your smelling salt. We get your pulse going and your brain working. We need to write the script about marsupians and the opera plot, your inventiveness and sense of humour.

I'm afraid to admit that I liked most of it and laughed out loud at quite a bit of it   

The musical elements such as the "Leg of Time" rock opera and the Insects concept album were brilliant. But the appeal for me was in knowing the genres he was poking fun at -- I've got all the concept albums he plagiarised to construct the pieces 

But that's basically the problem -- if it was aimed at me, it wasn't aimed at the "average" Radio 3 audience. I have no idea why it was on on R3 at all. And this was brought home sharply by how awkwardly the "straight" pieces (Carnival of the Animals, for example) were shoe-horned into the programme.

Good programme, wrong venue.

NOT 'am i bovvd ?' is it ?

Exactly. All the humour passed me by: I have not the faintest idea what it was about. And why should I? I don't have a TV and I don't listen to the kind of music you evidently needed to know about to get the jokes. I'm so glad to hear that it was genuinely witty. But the worrying thing is that perhaps they're trying to make Radio 3 something that only people like you, IRF, can understand. Lucky you.

But then where shall I go to find humour that I can understand? It's yet more cruel discrimination against those of us in the middle classes who were brought up in highbrow homes where we only ever had classical music. It's not fair!

I couldn't understand why the Carnival of the Animals was re-orchestrated. They must have had all the necessary intstruments there.