Last weekend the BBC World Service news carried a highly critical item about the Taliban hosting a news conference in India which barred female journalists. Grounds indeed for censure. My problem was that half an hour earlier my radio had a BBC programme that used to boast that it was uncontaminated by any male contribution. Employment equity laws made such a boast unwise and it's been dropped. But somehow I doubt if any males are on the programme production team at this time but the lawyers are happy. The content remains 100% female. So, how can it be wrong for the Taliban to bar females when the BBC half an hour earlier banned males? Is it not a bit hypocritical of the BBC to run an item critical of sexism while engaging in it itself?

Last weekend the BBC World Service news carried a highly critical item about the Taliban hosting a news conference in India which barred female journalists. Grounds indeed for censure. My problem was that half an hour earlier my radio had a BBC programme that used to boast that it was uncontaminated by any male contribution. Employment equity laws made such a boast unwise and it's been dropped. But somehow I doubt if any males are on the programme production team at this time but the lawyers are happy. The content remains 100% female. So, how can it be wrong for the Taliban to bar females when the BBC half an hour earlier banned males? Is it not a bit hypocritical of the BBC to run an item critical of sexism while engaging in it itself?

Does anyone else remember TV Detector Vans? Sinister vehicles with a revolving antenna on the roof that supposedly prowled the streets and could tell what television channel you were watching. And if you didn't have a licence for that television set - kapow. An older person now, I suspect the vans were a con. I doubt they could detect a switched-on television with any degree of accuracy and certainly not which channel it was tuned to. By the time I left home nearly 100% of households had a television. So, all the TV enforcement folks did was check which houses to not have a licence and target them. When I first lived in Inverness I got a letter demanding to know why I didn't have a licence and threatening several unpleasant happenings if I didn't get one. I didn't have a licence because I didn't have a television. Some folk might say that the best thing to do then was just ignore the letter. I knew better. I knew of too many doors kicked down by the TV licence people, who regarded evasion as up there in the scale of criminal activity alongside raping your little sister, cutting her throat was a jagged tin can and feeding her body to the pigs. I went to the Post Office in Queensgate to explain my lack of a licence.

Something like 45 years ago I was a regular on a BBC Radio Scotland teenage current affairs programme called Sunday Club. It involved a panel about six school kids interviewing two or three of the country's news makers. One Sunday we were interviewing a Czech dissident. He started talking about a beating his son had been by the Czech secret police. Because of what of you were doing, we asked. "Oh, no," he replied. "I'm proud to say he asked for it." Few Scottish parents at the time would have been proud that their kid had got a kicking from the police. While most youngsters only appeared on the programme three or so times I did a lot more. I suspect that was because I wasn't the sort of kid my high school would have picked to represent them on the wireless.

I wonder how many British children died from suffocation in the 1960s and 70s after climbing into an abandoned fridge. Certainly there must have been enough that the government made a public education film warning kids to stay clear of fridges. Or was it telling adults to take the door of the fridge before illegally dumping it? We were also informed by the telly that if we did not use the underpass on the way home from buying New Shows our dads would almost run us down in his car and our grannies would be very perplexed. Was the kid or Charlie the cat who burned the house down by playing with matches? Or did Charlie talk the kid out of playing with the matches? I never did get to stagger around the country in an RAF boiler suit suffering from hypothermia. Downed RAF aircrew in the final stages of hypothermia were seldom seen on my street. I think the government perhaps maybe had some interesting ideas about the kind of lives most of the population were experiencing. New Shows, killer fridges, talking cats and hypothermia. They were obviously interesting but dangerous times.