The Week In Radio

"I'VE NEVER interviewed a living god... what should I call you?" opened Jeremy Paxman to the Dalai Lama. (Start the Week, R4, Monday). "This palace," he went on, "did it really have a thousand rooms?" "What will happen to you when you die?" (None of his business, and his holiness told him so). The Dalai Lama conveyed an overwhelming sense that the issues under discussion were comprehensible - just not in Paxman's terms. Excited even by the revelation that the infant Lama had located a set of false teeth belonging to his aged predecessor, Paxman was finally silenced by celibacy. "Any way of letting out semen... is harmful?" he murmured aghast in a schoolboy diminuendo.

What, one wonders, would either have made of the spermless sexual passions of Radclyffe Hall (The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, R4, daily), "born", as she said, "solely of animal impulse and nothing else" in 1886 to a philandering, syphilitic father who once hurled a joint of lamb at the cook, and a mother who packed her dyslexic daughter off to a succession of miserable boarding schools. After some teenage flings, she found true love in 1906 with Mrs Mabel Batten, a matronly ex-memsahib considerably her senior, and they set up house in London as "John" and "Lady" - lunch with Elgar, poker with Wilfred Thesiger, tea with Isadora Duncan. After Mabel's death in 1915, Hall fell under the spell of the clairvoyant Gladys Leonard. She attracted the venom of fellow seancist, St John Lane Fox Pitt, pioneer of incandescent street lighting, who lobbied the Home Secretary to ban her novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928. Undefended by fellow writers - HG Wells went abroad, Galsworthy was too busy and Shaw claimed to be "too immoral to have any credibility" - the book was proclaimed "dangerous, disgusting, obscene and prejudicial to the morals of the community". In a word, irresistible.

The same was probably said of chewing gum, then at the height of its popularity in the US (Up A Gum Tree, R4, Friday). Originally, spruce sap gum was kept chewable in little tin boxes that dainty belles would wear round their necks at dances. General Santa Ana, of Alamo fame, helped finance the development of such mixtures as Blatt's Grape Gum, Alexander's Complexion Gum and, most intriguingly, Campbell's Happy Thought Gum. By the Second World War, Wrigleys had a stick in every soldier's kitbag. The remains of a 9,000 year-old Swedish teenager were recently excavated sheltering a wad of sap sweetened with honey and bearing toothmarks, presumably older even than the Dalai's dentures, and nearly as venerable.