Like a sort of protracted Sunday supplement-style magazine, it's full of discussions of crime, schools, plastic surgery, holidays, car prices, property prices, what to buy, what to eat, what to do with your SSIA? (Put it somewhere where the sun doesn't shine and then have Gillian McKeith scrutinise what that says about you? ) 'Doctor' Gillian McKeith is the doyenne of the Sunday supplement moral code, by which consuming Omega-3 oils makes you a better person, and your poo is an observable stand-in for your conscience. But the "nice, sausage-shaped, conker-brown" stuff hit the fan last week for the Awful Poo Lady, when the British Advertising Standards Authority ruled that her use of the term 'doctor' was "likely to mislead".

Matt Cooper gleefully swooped on this story on The Last Word. He spoke to The Guardian's Ben Goldacre, of badscience. net fame, who has long been crusading against McKeith, and who wrote a 4,500-word tirade about her in Monday's Guardian. Goldacre said he had no problem with anyone issuing sensible nutritional advice, but he objected to McKeith's clinical qualifications being taken seriously when all she had was a correspondence-course PhD from an unaccredited American university.

Goldacre kept interrupting himself to say he was worried because McKeith is notoriously litigious, but the prospect of being sued didn't seem to worry Matt Cooper in the slightest: maybe now that he has more listeners than RTA 's Drivetime, he can afford it.

Cooper gave the impression that he enjoys nothing better than stitching up snake-oil merchants, and didn't drop the sardonic tone even while speaking to an audibly bristling Max Clifford, McKeith's publicist.

Clifford was wrongfooted from the outset, and had nothing convincing to say in McKeith's defence. In fact, he sounded as if he had something painful up his fundament. He should speak to someone about that.

On the subject of the ailments to which the middle classes tend to fall victim, You and Yours on BBC Radio 4 did one of its special phone-ins on Tuesday with guest Oliver James, author of the new book Affluenza, a phenomenon which is going to be the next big thing in all the Sunday magazines.

James, a psychologist, posits that citizens of English-speaking nations are twice as likely to suffer from mental illness. He describes affluenza as a "contagious middle-class virus causing depression, anxiety, addiction and ennui". He told presenter Peter White that the cause is the placing of too high a value on "money, possessions, appearances - both physical and social - and fame".

That may sound self-evident - and it's no more than followers of Jesus and Allah have been saying for centuries - but where James starts an exclusive new school of thought of his own is in his proposed solutions. He wants a nought knocked off all house prices, estate agents nationalised, and a cap on the amount of money people can make.

White accused him of being political and he denied it, unnecessarily. But it became clear during the ensuing phone-in - which, like most phone-ins, consisted of a succession of callers who could bore for England - that he is, of course, stridently political. He said neoconservatism had been an "absolute con", that there had been "no trickledown effect", that privatising the utilities had been "an absolute fraud", and don't even get him started on New Labour.

Stirring stuff for a timid little consumer programme.

The revolution may be not be televised, but it could well be on radio.