RADIO: Saved by Bach " the perfect antidote to Christmas

Let me belatedly address Radio 3's A Bach Christmas in which music by the composer was broadcast for 10 days solid. The feeling at this end before it started was faint unease. John Sessions once did a very amusing radio comedy in which he pretended to be a philistine English composer who airily dismissed Bach by saying that his music sounded just like a man running upstairs and then running downstairs again, which made me laugh at the time but has rather inconveniently stuck in the memory.

I need not have worried too much. Bach may be a bit more samey than Beethoven but there's enough diversity there " even if some of that diversity resides in rather more organ music than you may have cared for. (Much of which was, it seemed, shunted to the small hours.) But on the whole I relished, for the second time in the year, the delightful feeling of knowing that whenever I turned on Radio 3, I was in no danger whatsoever of hearing something by Stephen Sondheim.

Indeed at times it seemed as if the idea was even more daring in scope and intent than the station's Beethovenathon: because of the far more explicit and serious religious nature of Bach's music, it was as if the nation was being exposed clinically to the effects of an almost medieval devotion in order to see what outcome it might have. It is probably too early to collate the results but for what it's worth, listening to vast amounts of Bach helped me through that awful run-up to the horror that is Christmas.

Finally, j'accuse. On one of the final Loose Ends (Radio 4) of 2005, Jimmy Carr, an after-dinner speaker on the corporate circuit, told a joke that went like this: 'The male gypsy moth can smell the female gypsy moth up to seven miles away, and that fact also works if you remove the word 'moth'.'

I wonder what is going on here. It would appear that he thinks gypsies are smelly, and that it is funny to say so. Certainly Carr seems to think well enough of his bon mot to repeat it in the mass media (even on RTE in Ireland, where the atmosphere about Roma and travellers is close to flashpoint. Look up 'Padraig Nally' on the net for further info). I am surprised that he has not got into any significant trouble; but I hope he now does, and into a hell of a lot of it. I can understand why no Roma were listening to Ned Sherrin's ghastly little show towards the end of December 2005 " I was apparently the only audience member " but maybe someone should say something that will put Carr's career on ice for a few years, so he can reflect upon the error of his ways.

n.lezard@independent.co.uk

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