‘There was a bit of a cock-up on the catering front,” as Reggie Perrin’s ex-army brother-in-law Jimmy Anderson (Geoffrey Palmer) used to say, as his way of scrounging a buckshee, trouble-free dinner.

D’oh! Us chaps! On Monday I endured a slight culinary blip, having misunderstood what I maintain (against some feminine opposition) were misleading instructions on a packet of M&S Mediterranean-style vegetables.

“Preheat oven,” they said. “Remove film & sachet of dressing. Place vegetables on pre-heated baking tray.”

I did all this — with the result that can be seen above. I mean the melted plastic container, which of course ought never to have gone into the oven.

But could I have known this? “Remove . . . sachet of dressing.” How is this to be achieved without one’s first removing the film? Two superfluous words had led me into a (very rare) catering cock-up.

As I sat down to enjoy our (mercifully retrievable) vegetables I heard from the radio two more superfluous words which have been a source of irritation to me for some weeks.

John Suchet — admirable man though he is — promotes his new book by telling us in a Classic FM advertisement that its subject, Ludwig van Beethoven, is “the composer that I believe is the greatest of them all”.

Come on, John. “I believe!” Beethoven is recognised by everyone as the towering genius of music. You’ll be telling us next that “that cove William Shakespeare is pretty hot stuff as a playwright”.

As Jimmy Anderson might have said.