Controversial people do tend to draw listeners, but what if they're controversial for the wrong reasons?

Twink has been one of the easiest targets in the national firing range ever since the 'zip up your mickey' incident, in which an answering machine message she left for her jilting husband found its way 'mysteriously' onto the internet.

Everybody knows that society still can't forgive women for being unladylike; if they're also over 50, and therefore breaking the unwritten rule that postmenopausal women should be unseen and not heard, it's a hopeless business all round.

Did Newstalk hire her so that snide listeners could have a laugh at her expense? Maybe not, but I for one ended up feeling a little sorry for her. Mind you she didn't seem at all in need of the sympathy: she was having a wonderful time. "I don't know why I didn't do this years ago!" she proclaimed in that drag queen voice of hers.

Wednesday was her last day, and her production team surprised her in the studio with a bunch of flowers. "Oh my! Flowers! Bird of paradise flowers!"

she husked. "Do you know I haven't a flower in the house? !"

You might wonder why they didn't make the presentation after the show, but really, if you think about it, paying tribute to her on the air was so much more decent and generous. Twink was overcome. It was like Sunset Boulevard except with a happy ending.

Another grand old dame of entertainment also received honours in recent days. According to the latest JNLR listenership figures, an extra 7,000 people have been tuning in to RTE Radio 1's Sunday Miscellany, and it's easy to see why. Like a constant but humble old friend, Sunday Miscellany is always there, quietly doing the right thing. It's gentle, unselfconscious, beneficial and well-liked, and yet (gasp) it doesn't have a big-name presenter, it doesn't "tackle the big issues" and it doesn't . . . sweet Jesus, what a mercy . . . it doesn't have a number where you can text in your comments on air.

The worry is that now that RTE bosses have discovered that people are actually listening to Sunday Miscellany, they'll do something to make it more popular, especially with the yoof. They'll bring in Derek Mooney to force continuity between the already perfectly autonomous segments, or they'll get Eamon Dunphy to supply a regular weekly item, now that he's suddenly got so pensive and all. Now there's a man who knows how to reinvent himself.

Speaking of revisionism (sort of), Michele Reid was irreverently funny on last week's Stand-up Stories, the Radio 1 series in which comedians deliver their own scripts.

Reid's piece, 'A Day in the Life of Kitty Sway', was a picture of what Ireland is like for the English immigree, complete with well-acted inserts. There's the bathing in the Forty Foot ("John Fitzherbert's the name, professional naked brown man's the game"); the futile attempt to conceal a British accent from a taxi driver; Temple Bar; the 800 years ("I told him, 'I am not responsible for your oppression, you thick Irish potato-eating bogtrotter'. Listener, he cancelled the wedding"); and all kinds of other, breath-of-freshair impertinence. But what's this? First broadcast in 2001? Oh well, I suppose RTE can hardly commission new comedy scripts: no-one has written any for the past five years, have they?