The pain of returning from holiday was exacerbated by the first 6-0-6 football phone-in of the Premier League season (Saturday, Radio 5, 6.06pm), in which Alan Green took seriously a man who rang in to discuss, in interminable detail, his own favoured team’s chances of escaping relegation. It’s obviously going to be a long nine months for all of us.

More cheeringly, the first of six episodes of Mark Evans’s Bleak Expectations (Radio 4, Wednesdays, 11.30am) was a joy. It purports to be a spoof of Dickens; it isn’t really, because all it does is take elements of his writings – childhood, poverty, childhood poverty, people whose names are either the exact opposite or a perfect description of their personalities – and point fun at them in a modern way.

It’s the story of Pip Bin, who besides being the hero of a Dickensian classic also turns out to have written several of them – A Story of Two Towns, Miserable Mansion, The Old Shop of Stuff, all of them informed by his own childhood. All, that is, with the exception of his novel Lustful Killer Bees From Mars.

Right at the beginning Evans got one doubtless much-cherished parody off his chest – “My father’s family name being Bin, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Fliptop Bin” – before realising, with a thrill of despair, that all he had really done was saddle himself with a hero named Bin, and that the best way out of it was to be extremely silly.

Which he did admirably. Pip was joined by sisters named Pippa and Poppy. Papa came back from the Indies and gave them presents – a puppy for Poppy, a pipe for Pip and, for Pippa, an anvil. Later, Pip’s idyllic childhood was blighted by the death of his father and the madness of his mother and he was shipped off by his evil guardian, Mr Gently Benevolently, to St Bastard’s, the most vicious school in England, where there is but one rule – to obey the other 8,000 rules. Here Pip was immediately beaten by the headmaster, Mr Hardthrasher, and made friends with Harry Biscuit, whose father had invented the biscuit.

At the end of episode one, Pip and Harry were making plans to escape, along with Pippa and her anvil, currently banged up at the next-door convent, St Bitches.

What will happen? Who cares? I just hope I will laugh even more next week than this.

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