Every time you tune in, Ryan is talking to someone about the state of their car, and usually they're the classic, interchangeable Ryan show contributor . . . female, bubbly, do you-fancy-me-Gerry. They finally picked a winner on Friday, having judged the genuine "ming" and "mank" from the artificial, and this ended with another burbling promotion of the Ford. It's "a vehicle to be proud of", said motoring journalist Michael Sheridan. "It says you haven't thrown in the towel;

you still have some aspirations to be seen as a member of the human race, not just as a parent."

When he's not selling cars, Ryan seems to spend the rest of the time reading things out of the Mirror or the Daily Mail. And on Friday's show, he was reading more as a parent than as a member of the human race.

There was a report of a shocking incident in a shopping centre in Limerick: some local 'harmless' fella beckoned an 11-year-old boy. Nothing bad happened . . . the boy knew better than to follow him . . . but it made the Mirror anyway because Something Terrible Could Have Happened.

The boy's mother was on, mostly to criticise the gardai for not making enough of a fuss. When she complained to them about the fact that the man was allowed to hang around the shopping centre all day, they told her he wasn't breaking any laws.

At this, Ryan hit the roof. "That's just balls! That's rubbish! I can't tell you how sick this makes me. Do you know what is really offensive, saying to you 'he's not breaking any laws'. What does that mean?"

He told her she should make formal complaints to everyone . . . the gardai, the shopping centre manager.

He said he despairs sometimes, he really does. "It is utterly unacceptable, " he said. "Why do we have to wait for something appalling to happen before something is done?" He's right. The harmless fella should really be lynched before he offends anyone else. And now Michael McDowell is gone we'll all have to drive to Limerick in our SUVs and do it ourselves.

Still on competitions, but of an altogether more genteel sort, Thursday's Woman's Hour on Radio 4 did a feature on the social one-upmanship involved in having a picnic. Who knew?

Picnic time is under way in Britain, now that the Glyndebourne opera festival has begun. (It's also cricket season, as Radio 4's long wave listeners will realise. Sigh. ) Seemingly if you take the wrong bottle of wine to Glyndebourne, other picnickers will look down on you. There are some people who take picnicking extremely seriously, and there are other people who crave their good opinion. These are just some of the things you can learn from listening to the BBC.

Food critic Charles Champion and picnic caterer ('picnic caterer') Sanchia Lovell described their perfect picnics. Champion, being a determined bloke, doesn't like anything effete . . . "knives and forks are for wimps" . . . and favours a wide-mouthed thermos flask. She takes rhubarb trifle and asparagus (though not together), and wouldn't have sandwiches, "unless it was an afternoon tea-style picnic, and then there would obviously have to be cucumber sandwiches". Essentials include something to chill your champagne. So, that's a no to milk bottles of lukewarm tea in the bog then, is it?