Radio review

Things just get odder. Yesterday morning I tuned in to Talk Radio, to find Colin Wilson telling Scott Chisholm about his latest book, on the Sphinx at Gaza. It seems that you get quite distinct patterns of erosion from water and wind - specifically, water runs down creating grooves that look, in Wilson's words, like "a series of buttocks spread side by side"; and this is what you get on the Sphinx.

What this shows is that the Sphinx must have been built when Egypt had a much wetter climate, which puts it around 7,000 BC. Also, modern technology could not lift the giant blocks used in the pyramids (the Japanese tried a couple of years ago), so the Egyptians must have had engineering skills beyond anything known to modern science. Probably they shifted the blocks using their collective mind-power. Furthermore, there are maps suggesting knowledge of America and even Antarctica which, naturally, was not covered with ice at the time; all this points to some advanced prehistoric civilisation.

This may strike you as a mighty hypothesis to build on one buttock-faced sphinx, but the listeners seemed convinced. True, one man phoned to suggest - "with the deepest respect" - that Wilson was a conman cashing in on a craze for pseudo-science; Chisholm gave him short shrift, though, pointing out that Wilson is a successful author who almost certainly has more money than he knows what to do with. Otherwise, the main thing that worried callers was how all this fits in with the theory that a meteorite struck the earth around 9,000 BC, causing a tidal wave which swamped the civilisation of Atlantis and left us with legends of the great Flood (the answer being, it fits in perfectly). We also had a discussion of the reversal of the earth's magnetic fields - a problem, Wilson reckoned, because it temporarily reduces gravity, allowing all kinds of rays to come in from space. Could reductions in gravity, one woman wondered, have helped the Egyptians to move the stone blocks?

I don't know. Just looking out of the window, or walking down the street, everybody seems so sane, so normal. It's quite frightening, really.

Meanwhile, Radio 4 are revamping their drama schedules, getting rid of the old-style Saturday Night Theatre - nobody can concentrate on 90-minute plays any more. Instead there'll be two shorter slots, starting in July with a series of Sherlock Holmes stories, "never before repeated". There is an eerie beauty about this locution which no science or pseudo-science can explain away.