In the 1990s, software houses (what we used to call game studios) rushed to implement 3D graphics, awkwardly plastering rotation and texture mapping and other whizzbangs over the top of perfectly good 2D gameplay; the gameplay was often left a second or third class citizen. 3D games have since matured and dominated, but other less graphics-oriented games still exist, now with several decades of development behind them. While mostly ignored, they have had the time and breathing room to be perfected.

So it is too with radio and TV. I’ve mostly ignored radio all my life. How could it compete with TV’s Gouraud shading, mipmapping and bilinear filtering? Well, while TV has spent the last 70 years developing its own artform and sucking the audience out of radio, radio has been busy perfecting itself. Thus I get to the point: the Today programme on Radio 4 is 50 years old this Sunday, and is astonishingly good.

I listened to it this morning, and in between the news and an improvising silent film pianist, who played his own soundtrack while talking, was a former American ambassador to NATO complaining about how little development money Afghanistan is receiving. He made the extraordinary claim that Afghanistan gets more money from Western drug addicts buying the product of their poppy fields than from Western aid. Does there exist a more convincing demonstration of the total failure of the drug war?