Guys, I hear you. And that includes you, Paxo. I relate to what you’re saying about our scrapping of the UK Theme after 30 gentle, evocative years as the start to the Radio 4 day. What’s more, I agree. It can be hard to know you’ve goofed when everyone around you keeps telling you how brilliant you are, but we did. We underestimated the affection out there for Fritz Spiegl’s 5.30am audio smoothie of mutedly patriotic songs from our sceptred isles. We forgot that insomniacs found it so boring that they went back to sleep and early risers deemed it so irritating that they jumped out of bed. And we are already dishing out plenty of those “pacy” news briefings.

So we’ve had a little rethink. We’re going to meet these sentimental insomniacs halfway. People who can’t do without Men of Harlech and Londonderry Air will be able to download the Spiegl medley from our website and programme their digital radios to play it whenever they like. For everyone else, I’ve put together my own Compilation for a New Brit Century — a sort of Thompson’s Desert Island Discs . There’ll be Blur’s Clover over Dover, of course, Clocks by Coldplay, a bit of Bartók-infused Fricker from the 1950 Cheltenham Festival (got that on vinyl) and a daring minute’s silence from James MacMillan’s Silence. We will round things off with the seminal climax of Birtwistle’s Panic — you know, the “primal goat dance” that freaked out the entire Albert Hall on the Last Night of the Proms in 1995. Ha! That should wake them up!

Yours ever,
Mark Thompson.