My sympathy for the allegedly underpaid women of the BBC — about whom so much has been heard this week — would be greater but for the horse-like laugh of Moira Stuart (above). This has had me reaching for the volume control on many mornings recently during Chris Evans’s Radio 2 breakfast show (to which I always turn when Naughtie fatigue sets in). Smashing woman though she is, Moira should let the sultry sexiness of her voice — sans bray — stake her place on the airwaves beside the chirpiness of Evans and the good-sort chumminess of sports man Vassos Alexander.

Sports fans have not had a good week, with Rangers in deep doo-doo and the England football team, it would seem, on the point of being managed by a man whose intellectual deficiencies (to judge from his recent trial) appear to be a source of pride to him rather than shame.

Meanwhile, revelations about the huge pay packets of the BBC’s Match of the Day pundits — against which the Beeb’s females have measured theirs and found them wanting — have not surprised me, so much as my discovery of the stupidity of what some of these gentlemen say to ‘earn’ them.

A couple of prize examples were cited by the admirable Remote Controller TV columnist in Private Eye. Here, for instance, is Alan Shearer’s bathetic observation following Arsenal’s 7-1 trouncing of Blackburn: this was, he said, “a real comfortable win for Arsenal”.

Remote Controller noted, too, the strange silence of the BBC’s commentators on the subject of John Terry’s sacking by England during the first Chelsea game — which he missed through injury — following his departure.

In the cosy world of sport that would have been far too embarrassing to mention.