Brown, reputedly the biggest brain in Westminster, kicked off a new series of features on Radio 4's Open Book in which famous readers pick their top five reads. As presenter Mariella Frostrup put it, he displayed a "positively Catholic" taste in literature.

His first choice was Unbowed, the autobiography of Kenyan environmental campaigner and Nobel prizewinner Wangari Maathai. He also likes the New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, and thinks Britons: forging the Nation 1707-1837 can restore a British person's pride in being British.

His only nods to fiction were Docherty, a tough, working-class Scottish novel set in the Depression, and the children's book The Snail and the Whale, which he presumably reads for the edification of someone smaller, needier and mentally feebler than himself.

Heavens, it looks as if they could be facing into a frightening new era of intellectual rectitude over there in Britain. Readers across the land will be hiding the new Harry Potter under the Chesterfield and whipping out The Works of John Knox instead.

Gruel Britannia.

On the whole, there was not nearly enough humour in the handover of power at Number 10.

Wednesday's News at One on RTE Radio 1 gestured at what might have been supposed to be comedy with an Ode to Tony Blair, written by the poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan, which wasn't at all funny.

"Tony, ta-ta, put your feet up, " it went. "Your 10 years have put years on me, and put years on you, and put years on us all, so settle yourself on your Belgravia settee." I wonder is that really the best he could do. Ten fertile, satire-forming years of Tony Blair, and all we get is a knowing reference to a prestigious address in SW1.

It took a special one-off edition of Down The Line on Radio 4 to lampoon the thing with some indispensable frivolity. (Down the Line, for those who haven't heard it, comes from the makers of the Fast Show and is a send-up radio phone-in which has been banged on about ad nauseam in this column.

Think Liveline but intentionally funny. ) 'Sandra' from Weston Super Mare rang in to give her view on Tony Blair's legacy and the future under Brown. "All I have to say is politics, schmolitics, " she said. "You know what I mean? Elections, schmelections. Voting, schmoting. Forget it. Tony Blair? Tony Schmlair. Legacy? Schmlegacy."

Another instantly recognisable caller was 'Chris Nibs', who respects "the Tonester" as a fellow musician. "The thing that really bothers Nibs is this business about the Tonester being George Bush's poodle, " he said. "America is the number one most powerful nation in the world. Who the ruddy hell should we be sucking up to? Bhutan? Wales?" Think you know him? Doesn't he impose himself on the Irish Times letters page now and then?

Then there was 'Alan' from Winchester. This man is all over Irish radio. "The new Labour government, Gordon Brown's new government, Tony Blair's government as was, I don't feel, I don't feel in any way, I have no feeling at all, that the new government, that is to say Gordon Brown's new government, is really . . . and let's face it, I think we all probably feel the same, you probably think the same as I do . . . that the new labour government, Gordon Brown's new government, Tony Blair's government as was, is really going to be significantly different."

etynan@tribune. ie