LISTENING to BBC Radio 4 must be, I think, a bit like being a heroin addict. There are the highs, but oh my, there are the lows.

At 10 every Sunday morning my face twists in an agonised scream. Then the race for the off-button begins, knocking over furniture, dropping plates, just to stop that noise.

The condition I suffer from is known, in Radio 4 junkie parlance, as a serious case of “the Grundies”. It’s caused by any contact with The Archers, the station’s unfeasibly popular soap, but particularly on a Sunday, when the plummet from Broadcasting House, one of the best shows on radio, directly into The Archers, is especially painful.

Constant vigilance is required to ensure that as few seconds as possible are played of the theme tune, officially described as a “maypole dance”, but really a kind of aural virus. You would flinch if you heard it once at a morris dancing festival, but when played more than 20 times a week, for the past 55 years, it becomes seriously dangerous stuff.

So I am delighted that tomorrow sees the transmission of Victoria Wood’s spoof episode of the soap for Red Nose Day. The lamentable TV series Crossroads could not survive after Wood’s Acorn Antiques. I’m hopeful that her satire may do too for The Archers, after decades of complaint through the normal channels has failed.

How can Wood fail to strike at the actors’ patronising yokel accents? Or the long windy minutes of silence, interrupted only by mooing, grunting, or sighing (often constituting an entire plotline)?

But what really depresses me is what The Archers says about Britain: the sheer, poor quality dreariness of it. Its unjustified place at the heart of Britain’s supposedly high-minded radio channel gives it a faux respectibility for middle-class hypocrites who would turn their noses up at Emmerdale.

To the show’s two million fans I say: it’s time to think about a little change in your life to end a dependency on a drama that began to teach farmers about cow insemination.

Despite the uproar Wood’s spoof has caused on The Archer’s website (sample quotes: “Who is Victoria Wood?” and “I don’t want her interfering with our beloved show”), please allow the laughter to form a fitting farewell. To use a rural proverb befitting Ambridge, I’m hoping the sun will get the man’s jacket off faster than the wind.

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