Actually, that's Beckett for you. ) Fry also gestured towards a deconstruction of the pun: its meaning (possibly a contraction of pundigrion, according to the OED); why puns are funny or, more typically, not funny at all; compulsive punning, known as paranomasia; and why the British love puns so particularly.

He paid homage to headline-writers - those "unsung literary giants" that are sub-editors, their finest puns mistakenly attributed, as often as not, to the reporter or columnist who wrote the copy underneath. There was even a contribution from Prof Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire, who has gone so far as to conduct a survey of Christmas-cracker jokes. (So that's where the research grants are going these days. ) Above all, Current Puns was a chance for Fry to air some of his favourite puns. These included half-adozen word plays from the Radio 4 show, I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue (such as "psychopaths: crazy paving" and "measles: what artists use for self-portraits") and this personal favourite: "Why do Marxists only drink herbal tea? Because proper tea is theft."

Speaking of the theft of property, this is the anniversary of Israel's Six-Day War in 1967 and all week the BBC's Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, has presented Six Days That Changed the Middle East, a daily short programme on how those six days have shaped the region in the 40 years since.

"You cannot understand what is happening now without understanding the 1967 war and its consequences, " said Bowen. Israel still has control of all the territory it seized then, except for the Sinai desert, and "in the West Bank and east Jerusalem it has settled more than 400,000 people, in defiance of every interpretation of international law other than its own". He also contrasted Israel's ability to defeat three arab armies in less than a week in 1967 with its disastrous invasion of Lebanon last year when, after a month of war, "it couldn't stop a few thousand Hezbollah fighters from rocketing its territory".

This was a fascinating, enlightening series. The last episode is today but if you missed it you can still download all seven programmes from the Radio 4 website. If you did miss it, though, it's likely to have been because you were listening on long wave and obliged to endure cricket all day. In response to letters about the availability of Radio 4 in Ireland (some readers still seem to think it can be heard only in the UK), it's worth mentioning some of the ways you can pick it up here.

Long wave (198) has other problems apart from being the receptacle for cricket. Outside Ulster and the Pale, reception tends to be so poor that you need a pointy head, preferably with a tin plate in it. Apart from that, you can use a digital radio or tune in on digital television. Listening online is the most satisfactory method but you will need broadband to listen live and also to download podcasts (pointlessly unwieldy mp3 files for people who can't be parted from their iPods). But a humble dial-up connection will work for listening to past shows that aren't podcasts. You just download small audio files and listen to them using a free application such as Real Player.

Listen, it's worth it.