Quiet please. We will now observe radio silence

Radio: Peace broke out on Radio 1 last week. Just for an hour, mind you . Martin Kelner was there to record the unlikely sounding event

Give the people what they want, it is said, and they will beat a path to your door. And so Radio 1, not notable crowd pleasers during 1994, gave us an hour of silence on the first day of the new year.

Not literally, of course, although Paul Merton's Hour of Silence (Radio 1, New Year's Day) did begin with a montage of fab Radio 1 voices suddenly stilled by the lugubrious one who, after a pause of Radio 3 or Radio 4 dimensions, promised us the silent treatment; a trip "up Quiet Street, along Pin Drop Avenue, where silence means something more than when your Walkman batteries run out".

Had the scorned voices belonged to Mayo and Wright rather than Blackburn and Bates, who were cast off long ago anyway, this opening would have been even more pointed, but the programme's premise - that the intelligent use of silence is a vital component of music and comedy - was a brave one none the less on a network where normally the merest micro moment with neither platter nor chatter would have them checking to see if the transmitters were still working.

Among the advocates of the case for silence - a paradoxically eloquent lot - were Mike Peters, formerly of the far-from-silent group the Alarm, who has been recording silences in Snowdonia to play between the tracks on his album ("analogue rather than digital, more human"), and the composer John Cage, who is so devoted to the cause of peace that he has written a piece that is designed to be played in a silent auditorium before the audience arrives.

The deadpan Merton, justly famous for those hangdog looks he does on TV, was just the man for a perverse project like this. Lest we were in any doubt that he was aware of the wackiness of it all, he solemnly intoned some famous quotes on silence: " `Silence is the essence of music' - Alfred Brendel; `There's a kind of hush all over the world tonight' - Herman's Hermits."

A similar lightness of touch would have been welcome in Oedipus Schmoedipus (Radio 4, 30 December), in which the stereotype of the Jewish mother was allegedly investigated. Reinforced, more like. In her late forties the Jewish mother, we were told, oftenfinds herself short of a role, with no children at home to nurture.

A problem, you might suppose, that transcends religious boundaries. But apparently not. As the presenter Sue Margolis put it: "The last bar mitzvah waltz has been danced and suddenly life no longer butters Mrs Goldberg's bagel." Oy vay. The presence of Dave Schneider of On the Hour and Knowing Me, Knowing You led to hopes that the whole programme was a spoof, but I fear that it may have been for real.

Another former On the Hour alumnus, Armando Iannucci, brightened up those dull days between Christmas and New Year with In Excess (Radio 4), a series of half-hour essays on the excesses of the age. If Iannucci's style is sometimes a little arch - "If money is the root of all evil, banks are its botanical garden, and the bank manager its crusty old park keeper," he said - this studied wordplay will have suited many Radio 4 listeners considerably more than the extemporaneous nature of Anderson Country, which Iannucci displaced, and which has returned this week.

To hear the best line of the new year so far, though, you had to be listening to Radio 2 at five in the morning, as I was. Alex Lester (Radio 2) played "Town without Pity", a hoary old record by Gene Pitney. "Town without Pity," said Alex. "It's a nice idea. It should be a contest, like Britain in Bloom . . . `I see Stockport's won Town without Pity again!' "