Last Saturday radio documentary literally scraped the barrel of the bottom, with Sally Goldsmith’s Now Wash Your Hands (Radio 4). It was a tribute to the medicated Izal toilet roll — now sufficiently a part of history for us to get nostalgic about it rather than hating it as much as we did at the time. For those too young and fortunate not to have experienced it, the Izal loo roll was a sort of shiny white thing with the consistency of lino (it was best to scrunch it up before use, make it a bit more malleable) and smelling of coal tar. It didn’t do its job properly, tending to — how to put this delicately — spread the work rather than clean it up. Put another way, it … OK, maybe better not put it another way. Ask an older person if you’re that interested.

But by God it made for a jolly half-hour documentary on a weekend morning. From the middle of the 19th century, where the British Empire went it had a rifle in one hand and a weapons-grade bogroll in the other. Johnny Foreigner was invited to share in the Izal disinfectant experience, a miracle cure for tuberculosis, cholera, diptheria, typhus — everything short of baldness, really. Back home, the growth of the inside lavatory meant many more people went for the Izal and its cheaper, non-medicated competing brands than the more traditional forms of tending to your bitt-bott, such as torn up newspapers and string sacks that had formerly contained oranges. A cunning marketing campaign whereby municipal buildings were given free roll rolls in exchange for placing bulk orders of the disinfectant made going to a public lavatory an ordeal by fire for decades. By the Sixties, though, a more sophisticated clientele demanded a toilet roll that wouldn’t do untold damage to the perineum, and by the Eighties the Izal roll was no more. The surprising thing was that it took that long to die off.

But that was not the meat of Goldsmith’s programme. Rather it was the people who spent their lives in the Izal factory in Chapeltown, a suburb of Sheffield, making the things. A woman named Maggie Holmes, who ran one of the huge roll-making machines, handed over a cherished cutting from a local newspaper that honoured her and her colleague and best friend, Patricia for having produced 268 boxes of rolls — 72 rolls in a box — in a single eight-hour shift during “the busy time before Christmas”. Why Christmas should lead to an increase in toilet roll demand was not explained.

“It was a record that broke all other records,” Holmes said, proudly. And, yes, she and Patricia had set out to set the record. “If I could have my time over again,” she reflected, “I’d do it all over again. I loved it.”

As did the woman who once had the job of taking rejected rolls and making them fit for human consumption, as it were. If the tops of the roll weren’t flat she would sandpaper them flat. And the quality control supervisor who would select rolls at random and count the number of squares to make sure that the public wasn’t being shortchanged. That’s consumer care of an order you just don’t get these days.

And now — do you know what’s on the radio at five in the morning? I do, because that’s when I get up. It’s a commuting to London thing. Anyway, the problem with getting up at that time is how to occupy the brain without having to think, which means listening to the radio. For a long time I tuned in to Radio 5 Live, but at 5.30am we get Wake Up To Money, which has over the past couple of years seemingly been retitled Wake Up To Money Worries, and is depressing. Radio 7 thinks that all small children want to do at that time is sit quietly and listen to Cbeebies — how wrong they are — and Radio 4 segues from World Service broadcasting to a bit of news to Farming Today. There’s nothing more guaranteed to put the idle listener off going into farming than Farming Today. At least the bankers tuning in to Wake Up To Debt know that however bad things get for the rest of us, they’ll still be all right.

So I tried Radio 2, despite being allergic to music at that time of the morning — and it’s a revelation. Yes, there’s music, but it’s great music. They may as well tell Alex Lester to retitle the ironic The Best Time of the Day Show (from 3am) to Music For Fiftysomething Men. They’re all here — the Purps, the Stones, the Zepp. The best time to air guitar to Stairway to Heaven is 5.15am. I know this because I did it last week, naked — well, pyjamaed — unashamed and unobserved. Lester also has an admirable attitude to listeners who write in with requests — one asked for “anything by Michael Buble “, so he played Thin Lizzy. And the other day he signed off with Bob Lind’s wonderful Elusive Butterfly, which is one of those ultra-rare butterflies encountered only every 40 years or so.

But at 6am things get even more entertaining for bleary-eared fans of carcrash radio when Sarah Kennedy pitches up. In my necessarily brief experience of her work she hasn’t said anything particularly controversial, just chugged along being daffy. It’s very unlikely that Kennedy gets to choose her own play list, which allows her to react as a listener to the songs, many of which she appears to be hearing for the first time. Thus the other day, after playing a ditty in the modern idiom with lots of whooping up and down the register she said: “Whooh, shouty lady.” Then, recovering her professional poise: “That was Leona Lewis”, and left it at that.

On another occasion she came in with: “And that was Dr Who with … Dr Who ... Dr Hook.” She knew the right word was there, she just had to find it.

And in the run-up to Hallowe’en she was heard to muse: “I have never seen a ghost, but I’ve heard lots. Flutes, lutes and children’s voices.” Somehow this didn’t come as much of a surprise.

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