When young men's fancy turns to Radio 2

RADIO

"IT IS absolutely important," said Michael Green on Mediumwave (R4), "that we sound different from the commercial market-place." Next to the newly elevated acting Managing Director of BBC Network Radio, Jim Moir - himself almost as new at the helm of Radio 2 - must have shifted a little uneasily. His network had just broadcast Steve Wright's Sunday Love Songs, during which soppy letters are read out from romantic types, one of whom receives a prize of flowers and chocolates. Didn't that kind of thing start with Classic Romance?

Steve Wright is another new boy, suddenly dominating R2's weekend morning schedules. He is not as bad as was feared and, if he can only stop boosting his self-confidence by reading out letters telling him how great he is, he might begin to sound about right. His music is reasonably good, and he seems more comfortable among his own age-group than ever he did on R1. The aim is for him to attract his contemporaries to fill gaps in the audience left by what Moir's predecessor, the great Frances Line, used to call Radio Grim Reaper. Time and the Rajar figures will tell.

Sounding very different from the commercial market-place is John Walsh, now well into his second series of Books and Company (R4). Books and R4 should be natural allies but it seems hard to get the mix right. This one, for some reason, refuses to recommend new books unless they are on tape, when they are reviewed by the gloriously enthusiastic Joyce McMillan. Instead, the programmes are theme-based and, therefore, variable. The teen-fiction edition had my teenagers snorting derisively, but this week's What's Cooking? was the best so far, probably because Walsh was clearly having fun.

Musing about the increasingly fashionable symbiotic relationship between food and fiction were a couple of brilliant young novelists. Susie Boyt's marvellous book The Normal Man opens with the narrator's grandmother making delicious cakes but refusing to decorate them, because she saw icing as a shameful frivolity. Like John Lanchester in The Debt to Pleasure, Boyt uses such foody vignettes as an integral part of her plot. Lanchester, incidentally, gave a memorable definition of gastro-porn as a two-page colour photograph of a chef scowling handsomely at a scallop.

"Real" cookery books are famous for providing perfect bedtime reading - what Walsh calls prose comfort-blankets. But great writers from Chaucer onwards have always revelled in a gastronomic spread. Hemingway, said Lanchester, was sometimes just Elizabeth David in trousers and even that lovely man Thackeray was at his very best with a napkin tucked into his literary cravat. It's probably just that the nicest people, writers and all, appreciate a good meal. Once, when Thackeray was very hard-up, he was given a goose: his thank-you letter mentioned, very gratefully, that he had heard of stuffing a goose with sage, but never before of stuffing a sage with goose.

Now for a couple more R4 characters. William Donaldson is emphatically not A Retiring Fellow, but he has been despatched to various safe havens looking for a suitable spot to complete his senescence. Having thoroughly upset Bournemouth, he went this week to do the same to Fowey. He is so nasty and makes such heavy weather of causing maximum offence that your reviewer could only agree when he unwisely interrupted himself with the words "This is boring". If he lumbers towards your hamlet, retreat indoors and lock him out.

Even more bizarre, but similarly queasy, was the husky whispering Swedish blonde Lotta Erikson, prowling about the south of England to discover the perfect man of her dreams, the classic Englishman. Had she bumped into Donaldson, she'd have gone straight home. Instead she embarked on five one-night stands for the purpose of offering us Lotta and the Englishmen. The suckers she found sounded suitably embarrassed as they proffered their vital statistics and said they had come to terms with baldness, but she thought them marvellous - except that they all shared a deep attachment to their mothers, which confused her.

Look no further, Lotta, than Mrs Menuhin. As her boy Yehudi celebrates his 80th birthday, she has just passed her 100th. Humphrey Burton, who did so well a year or two back with Bernstein, is starting a promising series about Menuhin the Master Musician (Classic FM); this week's episode examined The Miracle Boy, the child prodigy who never practised scales and endured only three hours of school in his life. After that, it was his mother who taught him. Burton went to see her and her pride and power were still audibly terrifying. Her little lad remembered no cuddles from her, but a fierce lack of sentimentality. She recognised no authority at all, he said, save what her own mother might have done. You see, Lotta, mother always knows best.