They said he was irreplaceable — and, my goodness, didn’t they go on about it! But a few months after his takeover of Sir Terry Wogan’s breakfast slot on Radio 2, Chris Evans is proving a more than adequate substitute.

I can with justification say “I told you so”, having on more than one occasion predicted that Evans was going to make a pretty good fist of the job (and, moreover, that I would be glad to see the back of Sir Tel, with his complacent witterings, his smutty Janet and John stories and unfunny emails from his tedious ‘old geezer’ fans). This was an heretical position at the time, the general opinion among media folk being that listeners would be quitting in droves.

Here, for instance, is what the Daily Mail was reporting back in March: “The BBC is bracing itself for the news that [Evans] will have lost a million, and quite possibly closer to two.”

Well, out came the figures last month and the Mail was obliged to eat its words, as Private Eye gleefully spells out in its latest issue. “[Evans’s] breakfast show,” the newspaper reported, “averaged 9.5 million weekly listeners in his first three months in the job. This was a rise of almost 1.5m on Sir Terry.”

So much for the power of the Togs!

As a big Radio 2 fan myself, I was delighted by Monday’s special three-hour programme in which the veteran DJ Tony Blackburn ran through a newly compiled chart of the top-selling singles of the 1960s.

A number of commentators in Tuesday’s newspapers were expressing amazement at the high placing — at No 3 — of Ken Dodd’s Tears. This outsold the otherwise chart-dominating Beatles’ Can’t Buy Me Love, I Feel Fine and We Can Work it Out/Day Tripper (the first single I bought) and was beaten only by I Want to Hold Your Hand and, at No 1, by — of course — She Loves You.

In fact, Doddy’s success will have surprised only those callow youths who weren’t around in 1965 and were unaware how Tears dominated the radio airwaves that year.

As Monday’s chart reminded us, the sixties was the era not just of The Beatles, but also of Engelbert Humperdinck (Nos 8 and 11 with Release Me and The Last Waltz) and Rolf Harris (No 19 — ahead of the Fab Four’s I Feel Fine — with Two Little Boys. (Yuk and double yuk!) What did surprise me — as Blackburn’s informed commentary made clear — was that only four women figured in the entire top 60, headed by Cilla Black at No 27 with Anyone Who Had a Heart.

Even more amazing was that there was not a single Motown entry in the chart: that meant no Temptations, no Four Tops and none of the exquisite series of well-crafted classics turned out by The Supremes.

This was a great programme that made a powerful case for the regular return to the airwaves of the admirable Mr Blackburn and his sound-effect dog Arnold (Woof, woof!), who also made an appearance.

Blackburn had some great anecdotes, including one about how he once cut off a phone call from Frank Sinatra, believing he was merely a hoaxer. Ol’ Blue Eyes rang back, to say that he simply wanted a request playing for him.

You could tell as the programme proceeded that Blackburn felt he had been too long away — and that he was not exactly being invited to consider that this might be the start of something new for him with the Beeb. He complained, for instance, that he had not been given a personalised email address — “like other DJs” — for listeners to get in touch.

The programme, as Blackburn noted, was the brainchild of Phil Swern, the producer of Radio 2’s Sounds of the Sixties. Perhaps he will have another idea for Tony soon. I hope so.