I joined the panel on the BBC Radio programme Any Questions? in Eccles last week, with Jonathan Dimbleby. Chatting afterwards with members of the audience I found myself faced again, as always after broadcasts of Any Questions? (or its television equivalent, Question Time) with the question that people always ask: “How long in advance do you get notice of the questions?”

The answer is that you get no notice at all. Nobody does. None. Ever. These shows really are what they seem. Any Questions? is completely, horribly, live - we wait for the pips and the news, and then we're off.

But such is modern cynicism towards broadcasting in general that the few “spontaneous” programmes that still are spontaneous get no credit for it. Listeners who assume that everything's faked probably just think we are slower-witted than those clever folk on Have I Got News for You, who always have a quip ready.

Brownian motion

If you are as reckless as I am in throwing in alleged historical facts, you will know the nervousness I feel on rereading overconfidently written columns. But I hoped that my source was reliable when I claimed in print recently that, in the 1960s, the late George Brown, then Harold Wilson's heavy-drinking Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, had left Britain's National Economic Plan behind in a Mini, driven by a man with a red beard accompanied by a blonde in pink trousers, both unknown to him. Brown was returning from a meeting at which the much-vaunted plan had just been finalised. Drunk and stranded in the middle of nowhere after his government car broke down late at night, he had commandeered their car and ordered them straight to Westminster,

In making this bizarre claim, I trusted Peter Paterson's biography of Brown, Tired and Emotional. But it was with relief that I opened a handwritten letter from Sussex recently. It was from one of the two officials who had been with Brown, and whom he had left on the roadside as he sped away: “[From a phone-box] Donald [the other official] phoned the car pool. The First Secretary of State ambled unsteadily across to a service station and the last we saw of him was bent double climbing into the back of the Mini. He left the plan in the Mini after the couple dropped him off at Carlton House Terrace.”

Whatever the losses by Government of discs, laptops and papers these days, it's all so much less exotic now. The patriotic couple returned the plan the next morning. I wonder if they are still alive?

Beached

Meanwhile, as the other Mr Brown prepares to holiday on the East Anglian coast, I've been trying to find out on which particular beach King Canute ordered the incoming tide to stop. Many seaside villages claim that honour, and Canute was illustrating not the arrogance, but the impotence of rulers.

A pity. I should cherish the image of a thunder-faced Gordon Brown raging at the tide as the waves crash in. I shall think of him on a Suffolk beach hunched, obsessive, over his elaborate sandcastle with its little Union Jacks, labouring with total absorption on the castellations of one isolated tower - oblivious as the rest of the castle crumbles in the incoming surf.

How competent is this?

So the Government plans an annual competence test for GPs. Why do ministers keep proposing things that will cost more? Is something not getting through yet?

Face facts

A friend tells me of a friend's child, aged 5, who knew only one Leslie. Last week he met another Leslie. “Did you know,” he told his dad, “that Leslie got a new face this week?” A profoundly significant remark about categories. That boy will be another Wittgenstein.

Generation gap

With Joan Bakewell and others this week I recorded BOOKTalk Beach Books. Dame Joan championed Singled Out, by Virginia Nicholson, about the million or so British women who couldn't find men after the First World War, and started careers instead. Canvassing for the Tories in the 1970s I must have met hundreds, living alone, still fit, neat and pin-sharp in their seventies and eighties. It struck me that this huge event is less central to our collective memory because, by definition, almost none of them are our mothers, grandmothers or great-grandmothers. They are my childless great aunts, isolated on the fringes of family. Memory, like genes, is wiped away faster when there are fewer direct means of transmission between generations.

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