Can I be a male chauvinist pig, please? Just this once. After all, I've resisted for years and years. I deserve a bit of time off for good behaviour.

Very well then. Prepare to be shocked by the following sentence. Isn't it wonderful that, in Britain's top competition for young musical talent, the boys have just comprehensively routed the girls?

Now, before you start assaulting me with affronted e-mails, vitriolic ear-bashings and threats of grievous bodily harm, let me explain the context. I spent last weekend in stimulating company. I was invited - heaven knows why, since I look like a bespectacled tub of lard when I appear on television - to be a judge at the final of the BBC Young Musician of the Year. Hundreds of teenage prodigies go in for it, and are whittled down over many months until, for the final at the Wales Millennium Centre, just five are left: the winners of the strings, brass, keyboard, percussion and woodwind sections. And this year, for the first time in three decades, all five finalists were boys.

It was just a fluke, of course. The five were worthy winners in their respective fields. There was no sinister agenda at work; no conspiracy to keep female musicians “in their place” - as there was in the early 20th century, when fine women composers were laughed out of concert halls and orchestras were all-male preserves.

But it was a very welcome fluke, nevertheless. For what has been undeniable, over the past two decades, is that the pendulum has swung so far the other way that young men are in danger of becoming an endangered species in the classical music world.

Just look at the make-up of youth orchestras. Girls now outnumber boys by at least three to one, and the ratio is usually far higher in the strings and woodwind. Look, especially, at youth choirs. Teenage boys don't want to sing. It's not cool. They will be regarded as freaks by their friends.

That's one factor in the crisis. Another is the insidious expectation - in schools, in families, in society at large - that teenage boys will work less hard than girls, that they will achieve less, that they will give up more easily. And the third factor is that teenage boys are emotionally different from girls. They mature later, and differently. And they don't feel comfortable expressing deep feelings, especially in public. All these things explain why - in music as in so many other aspects of teenage life in modern Britain - the girls have been soaring ahead. But such observations tend to turn into self-fulfilling circular arguments. Boys aren't given the chance to learn flute or violin because “everyone knows” that such instruments are anathema to boys.

Which is precisely why it was thrilling, and massively reassuring, to see five boys battling it out in the BBC Young Musician. After half a century of persuading young women that, if they work hard, there are no obstacles to them reaching the top, society is gradually and belatedly waking up to the fact that it's now young men who need to be fired up, rather than being allowed to languish - stroppy, unmotivated and restless - on the lower rungs of every educational and social ladder.

Of course this goes far wider than music. The disengagement of hundreds of thousands of teenage boys - from education, from society, and then from the world of work and responsibility - is one of the tragedies of our time. The loss to the nation, in terms of untapped potential and unlocked talent, has been colossal. It should have been addressed a generation ago.

And even within the narrow world of classical music I'm not so naive as to believe that one TV talent contest will change anything. Especially as this particular show has attracted a huge amount of criticism (not least from viewers venting their spleen, most entertainingly, on the BBC's own website) for the way that it was produced for telly. Even I - a judge and therefore, I suppose, an implicated party - must acknowledge that the ratio of showbiz packaging and inconsequential chitchat to serious music-making (at least as the competition was presented on BBC Two and BBC Four) veered from the crass to the merely excessive.

But that, I fear, is symptomatic of the modern world, and the modern BBC. No other British organisation has the resources to run a big classical music competition requiring the services of a symphony orchestra for several days, and the ability to publicise it nationally in so many media. But the Faustian pact, for music lovers, is that it has to be done on the BBC's terms. And the present BBC is run by people who believe, for better or worse, that the only way to present “serious” culture on a mainstream TV channel is to tart it up so that it looks as much like a pop video as possible. It's really a failure of trust: they simply don't think that classical musicians - no matter how mesmerising their talents or charismatic their personalities - are by themselves enough of a draw to entertain millions of people in 21st-century Britain.

Yet having written that (and probably guaranteed that I'm not invited to the party again), I must say that the competition cheered me up enormously. The only time that teenage boys make headlines these days, it seems, is when they stab each other. But the more we publicise the gang culture, the drugs and the weapons, the more we implicitly signal to boys themselves that their inescapable fate is to become mired in this sordid, nihilistic world.

Not every boy can make music like the incredible Peter Moore, the 12-year-old Belfast-born trombonist who took the prize on Sunday - despite looking as if he wasn't big enough even to lift the instrument that he blew so thrillingly. But every boy has something to offer, something to give him a reason to value himself and to feel valued by others. It's an abject failure of our times that so many don't believe this to be true.

It's OK guv, we've collared the crocus

Could it happen anywhere except in the dear old eccentric UK? The economy may be bust. Public transport in a mess. Home-owners drowning in negative equity. Petrol more expensive than champagne. Banks reeling. The National Health Service in crisis. Teachers in revolt over pay.

But at least we will soon know where almost every publicly owned daffodil, daisy and dahlia in Britain is - to the inch! Yes, the National Trust has just set its staff the three-year task of mapping (with GPS technology) the exact position of every flower, vegetable, shrub and tree in 80 of its finest gardens across the country.

It's a dotty idea, but also rather delightful. It's what the Domesday Book would have been like if the Battle of Hastings had been won by Alan Titchmarsh rather than William the Conqueror. I just feel a bit sorry for the NT's gardeners, who must feel as if they have been ordered to count the pebbles on Brighton beach.

Still, if they need a few more helpers for this mammoth undertaking, there's an easy answer. We should assign to the task the 4,000 police officers who (as The Times reported yesterday) seem to have been twiddling their thumbs for the past two years in the seriously underachieving Serious Organised Crime Agency. Soca wouldn't even need to change its catchy acronym. It could simply become the Serious Organised Crocus Agency.

Cliffhanger

Gloom in the pews of my favourite endangered species - the Church of England. If last week's dreadful forecasts by Religious Trends are to be believed, the only people still going to church in 20 years' time may be the Archbishop of Canterbury and Sir Cliff Richard. Even so, I bet we will still have to endure interminable arguments about women priests.