We all have to find our own way to keep those demons at bay that assail us in the dark hours of the night when sleep won't come. I found my remedy in the 1980s when I started listening to Richard Ackland's lawyerly voice as he was hosting ABC's Late Night Live at ten past ten.
He was followed by Phillip Adams in - when was it? - 1991, whose lip-smacking and opinionated hosting of Late Night Live kept me sane for the next thirty-three years, until, in mid-2024, he handed over to David Marr. Since then the show's calibre and topics seem to have deteriorated - and I'm not saying this just because I recently read David Marr's book PANIC, where on page 2 he discusses panic and panic merchants, particularly those who repesent themselves as guardians of decency, which closes with the sentence "Perhaps I'm alert to the subject because I'm gay." Oops! - maybe it does; after all, I'm old-school.
Fortunately, I have found a replacement in the BBC's "The Rest is History", which is available on YouTube, from where I copy it with the nifty YouTube-to-MP3 Converter Y2Mate onto a memory stick before walking it back to my bedside radio for another fight with my demons.
The series has 825 episodes which should keep me going for quite some time even if I cheat a bit and have another helping for my afternoon snooze on the verandah, but just in case I run out of things to listen to, I already have another equally enthralling BBC production lined up, "In Our Time", which explores a wide variety of historical, scientific and philosophical topics and has already amassed an amazing 1089 episodes.
I'm all set up for 2026 as I report another bit of progress: after twenty-five years of marriage, I have finally persuaded Padma NOT to clean every plastic container and glass jar within an inch of its life before committing it to the recycle bin. Things can only get better from here!
