Talk to the Hand

For those of us who endured teenage years with radio presenters who sounded like your Dad in an especially uncool moment – one thinks of Simon Bates and Dave Lee Travis – it's heartening to hear just how frank and direct it can get on Radio 1 these days. Talk to the Hand – The Story of Masturbation (Radio 1, Sunday), a slickly produced documentary, began with slang names for masturbating, a number of which unsurprisingly had religious overtones ("bashing the bishop", "shaking hands with the Pope"). Then it dealt with the silence surrounding the subject ("It's not exactly dinner-time conversation") which presenter Aled Jones immediately tackled. "First up," he wondered, "what are we talking about here?" The tone throughout was friendly and useful. What I especially liked was that, before we got on to rather more sensational stories, the programme acknowledged that normality is at best a relative concept. "We are all normal but in different ways," one of the experts suggested, and you couldn't help thinking what a cheering message this was to give out to an impressionable and possibly worried young listener. There were, of course, wince-inducing tales – "I decided it would be a good idea to use a mascara bottle," said one young woman regretfully – but mainly this was sensibly handled and coolly delivered.