The magic of radio drama is that it provides no visual cues to limit the imagination. That’s what Stephen Pollard argued on this page yesterday. After listening to more than three hours of self-congratulatory programming to celebrate the 40th anniversary of BBC Radio 4 on Sunday night, I can only say, Stephen, either you are wrong or have an enviable ability to suspend your disbelief.

When I listen to BBC radio drama, I get a very specific picture that is impossible to shake. Whether it is an earnest play about the Congo (“no good — roadblock!”) last week, or a worthy production about the Duke of Portland yesterday, I find myself transported to the cosy BBC studio in leafy Maida Vale. In it are assembled actresses whose dangly earrings can be faintly heard clinking on tape as they swish their hair to and fro, and actors whose facility with accents is a source of amusement to their family at Christmas (“do your Welsh — no that’s Indian! Oh do it again!”). In the spirit of am-dram societies everywhere, it is such fun for the participants, in precisely inverse proportions to the enjoyment of the audience.

Behind them — and this is crucial to the effect of the whole — is the resourceful sound-effects chap. His arsenal appears to include a pair of well-used coconut shells for horses hooves in Victoriana revivals, and an old-fashioned child’s toy telephone for the necessarily archaic bring bring ring tone (the formulation: “bring bring — darling, is that the phone?” is a turning point in Radio 4 dramas roughly once a week).

During the frankly indecent orgy of self-love that passed for an anniversary review of the channel, panellists were repeatedly invited to be critical. Only one dared, in the closing minutes of the show: Chris Smith, the former Culture Secretary. “Well, The Afternoon Play can get it really wrong,” he said.

That’s an understatement. The Afternoon Play is a symbol of all that is wrong with the complacent timewarp of Radio 4. It is the radio equivalent of the kind of low-budget television drama common on our screens until the 1970s, complete with wobbly walls and hammy cues.

TV doesn’t insult our intelligence like that now — it has modernised its acting and production to attempt a better simulacrum of the real world. I know controllers like to say radio drama gets audiences of several hundred thousand. I say: 1) Radio 4 is a monopoly of its kind and 2) its listeners are particularly partial to a post-lunch nap.

The Afternoon Play is a kind of aural lobotomy. At first sound of those clippity-cloppity coconut shells your spirit rebels, wanting to rise up, drive a fast car, have sex, get drunk, be alive in Britain in 2007. But something in your soul dies, and you can’t summon the energy to give even the radio a good switching off.

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