Rugged performance

Speaking as someone with a huge Cruden's Concordance (with a good tailor it doesn't show), nothing delights me more than picking out quotations from the Bible to demonstrate just how petty and vindictive the Old Testament God could be. Among His many misdemeanours, He made the residents of Topheth "eat the flesh of their sons and daughters" (Jeremiah 19:9), permitted the pregnant women of Tirzah to be "ripped up" (2 Kings 15:16), and when David had the temerity to organise a census in Israel, responded by killing 70,000 men (1 Chronicles 21:14).

But for sheer small-minded spite, surely nothing equals this passage about Elisha in 2 Kings 2:23-4: "He went up from there to Bethel; and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, 'Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!' And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore 42 of the boys." Why, not even Noel Edmonds's Gotcha! ever went that far in a search for revenge, although the presenter did consider himself God Almighty.

We critics (who occasionally forget that our opinions are worth a halfpenny a ton) can sometimes appear to be as petty and vindictive as an Old Testament deity, but my seemingly trivial attacks on old baldhead Terry Wogan over the years do have a serious purpose.

On radio, listeners are blissfully unaware of his hair hat, but on television his bizarre weave is so disconcerting that I can't concentrate on the programme in hand, especially because I'm aware that in any photograph taken prior to 1971 he has less hair than now. Mr Wigon is also conscious of his Achilles scalp, and throughout yesterday morning's debut edition of The Terry and Gaby Show (Five), any reference to hair was quickly booted into touch, lest the conversation turn to the question of his very own syrup.

Which is only to be expected, because he's the star of the show and there would be hell toupee if the banter got out of hand and some unruly guest was allowed to pull the rug from over him.

Like countless other daytime shows, the old-git-and-young-mum template for this daily magazine programme has been copied from the US original, Regis and Kathie Lee. But where the powerful American networks can attract plenty of A-list celebrities to their morning schedules, British daytime shows have long been becalmed in a sea of mediocrity, forced to make do with guests who aren't even household names in their own households.

"We loved Gaby Roslin in Chicago," said Terry, reading out an email, but unfortunately Gaby was now in London, sucking the oxygen out of the County Hall studio and displaying more black roots than Kunte Kinte as she attempted to get a single complete sentence out without being talked over by her colleague.

Yet the elderly audience duly laughed at anything and everything that was said, encouraged by a handful of younger plants who cheered like the claque at the Paris Opera. Or, in the case of a Chris Evans production, like a market trader's stooges.

This being the first show, the "special guest" (using the word in its kindest sense, as in "special school") was Terry's Radio 2 colleague, Jonathan Ross, a man who is clearly repositioning himself in the broadcasting firmament to become the next Terry Wogan.

As I watched them idly joshing with each other, I was reminded of a brilliant documentary about fame made a few years ago by Will Wyatt and Bob Robinson, which concluded with a vast circle jerk of celebs appearing on each other's chat shows (Wogan on Ross, Ross on Parkinson, Parkinson on Wogan) accompanied by the Beatles singing All Together Now.

The only flicker of intelligence came from Johnny Ball, whose lucid explanation of how the eye focuses was also talked over by Wogan (a man who cannot stand anyone else being allowed to dominate the microphone). But Gaby's attempt at a vox pop was wretched, while the "Live Loot" segment was lifted straight from local radio.

As for inviting readers to send in examples of foolish labelling, we heard yet again about the apocryphal bottle of sleeping tablets marked "May cause drowsiness", a warning that, by rights, ought to be printed in the Radio Times alongside this programme.