In 1989, when I was at the Beeb, I made a long radio doc on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Hitler's birth. One of the people I interviewed for it was his secretary, Traudl Junge, who was then only a few years older than I am now.

It took me a long time to run her down. No, I'll re-phrase that. It took me a long time to find her, in a flat in Munich, at the end of what I remember as a rather long corridor. She was a good-looking woman with a blonde chignon, who gave me coffee and somewhat stale biscuits, and talked and talked.

She was lonely; lived more or less icognito; and she'd had a 12-year-long love affair with a married man who had recently died. As his wife hadn't known about this affair Traudl Junge hadn't been able to go to the funeral, to lay him and their relationship to rest. So she needed to talk, and who better to provide the pair of ears than another woman - a stranger who was guaranteeed to go away never to be seen again?

By the time I got round to asking her about Hitler she had forgotten that I was holding a microphone (long live radio! Much less intrusive than TV) and gave me a wonderful interview. At the end, as I was packing away my equipment, I commented on her very pleasant speaking voice and she told me she kept herself busy doing talking books for the blind.

But how come, I asked her, you speak such good English? Oh, she said, you know. My sister, she married an Untermensch (subhuman) and went to live in Australia. I stayed with them for some years and learned to speak English there.

Now...I fully understand how the word Untermensch, which she used casually, not ironically nor with any self-awareness, would have been to her an ordinary term in the days of the war. She was not an educated woman, nor I think a particularly reflective one. And of course, spending all her time with Hitler and his cohorts, would have meant she wasn't in touch with alternative views. But by 1989? You'd have thought, wouldn't you?....

Back then, of course (1989) there was no internet and no Google, so I couldn't find out as I have now that the said Untermensch was Polish and Jewish. You can't get much more Untermensch than that. But is it odd? Surprising? Hitler's secretary's sister marries a Polish Jew...Probably she just loved him. Or

Following on from the Dong Dong The Witch is Dead malarkey: now it appears that the head of the BBC pop music channel (BBC Radio 1) has decided that only a few seconds of the song should be played on tomorrow's Chart Show, prefaced with an explanation by 'a journalist' (which one?), because to play the track itself would be disrespectful.

This same man is not sure if he would or would not let them play the full track of I'm In Love with Margaret Thatcher, should this make it high enough up the charts to be considered. It's not censorship, he insists. And what's more, he says he 'referred up'. In BBC-speak this means he asked the most senior management what they thought: specifically, he asked the new Director General, Tony Hall, who has been in post a week.

Tony Hall was brought in to replace George Entwistle, who had to resign 54 days into his tenure of the post because of the awful handling by BBC management of a news report into the sexual predator, celebrity Jimmy Saville.

Clearly, BBC Directors General cannot win. The Corporation is funded by a licence fee (a tax, effectively) that everyone who owns a colour TV set has to pay, whether or not they watch BBC programmes. It is extremely good value for money, because for your annual £145.50 you get numerous TV and radio chanels, the catch-up BBC iPlayer and so on and so on.

But the VfM isn't the point. Many people who only watch cable, for example, or say they do, ask why they should pay for a service they don't use. To which the answer is that the public service remit of the BBC is what protects it (and the public) from lax journalism (ahem), and partisan broadcasting of the sort one sees in the USA...Fox News, for example. Also that the BBC sets the standard for good programmes of every sort...etc etc.

But the playing of a song in advance of Margaret Thatcher's funeral, due to be held on Wednesday, is highly partisan - whichever song they play. To play one, and not the other, would be awful. To play neither or play both in their entirety would make more sense. Both sets of partisans will then cry foul. The DG, meanwhile, newly in his job which he has said he relishes, has to have an eye on the renewal of the BBC Charter...decided by Government, without which the Corporation cannot continue in the way it has. He, not surprisngly (though I think it's a shame) agreed on the proposal to play only a few seconds of Ding Dong...WIll he regret that one day, or look back on his decision with satisfaction?

...but the evil spells live on.

Or

...the magic has survived.

because New Labour was more Thatcherite than Thatcher, and the only thing (someone will surely correct me) that is now being undone (a bit) is the total deregulation of the banking system. Although, actually, letting the banks so completely off the leash was a Labour policy, not hers. Ouch?

There have been one or two truly silly statements on radio and TV - possibly the silliest being that Margaret Thatcher was the most influential and important post-War Prime Minister Britain has had. Erm...she was the noisiest, no doubt. But perhaps the very quiet Clement Atlee changed this country just as much, albeit in the opposite direction.

Yet if you had been able to ask them, each would have said that s/he was for the little man. It's just that what was thought to be good for that little man (the woman wasn't much mentioned by either of them) was different. And while we're about it, Mrs Thatcher was neither role model nor help to women, because she hauled that ladder up so fast behind her it's a wonder it didn't bop her on the nose, or the bum.

Baroness Thatcher, vilified by the government and people of Argentina (understandably), incidentally brought down the military tyranny there following Argentina's defeat in the Falklands/Malvinas War. Meanwhile she supported the tyrannical Pinochet in Chile.

Baroness Thatcher, adored by the people of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Russia etc etc, could do business with Mikhail Gorbachev who inadvertently let loose the reins of empire, and lost it. In came Boris Yeltsin, of whom Thatcher approved, and he allowed a very small group of people to purloin the wealth of the State while others sold unwanted objects on the streets.

Now we have Putin and...but this is about her, not him. Apropos eastern Europe and Thatcher and miners...during the miners' strike of the early 80s, Coal Miners in the East Bloc reportedly donated parts of their wages to support their brothers in the UK. Oh no they didn't. The money was deducted at source from their wages and sent over...along with, from Czechoslvakia,  beyond their sell by date eggs. Czechs (I can't speak for Sovaks) thought this was hilarious. Actually, only the Czechs I spoke to. There must have been others...

And this non-State State funeral the unturnable lady is having, some of it at taxpayers' expense: they're not telling us how much we're going to be paying for this until afterwards, when it's too late, she's all buried and the dosh has gone. I don't think Clement Atlee got that.

The BBC, our non-State State broadcaster (well, okay, not quite: it's paid for out of public money but not in theory directed by the sitting government) has gone all gooey. It has not reported even handedly the less than tributary tributes - to the annoyance of many of its staff. And if, as seems possible, Ding Dong the Witch is Dead does make it to number one in the charts, will Radio 1's playlist include it as frequently as its popularity would require?

We'll soon find out.

The start of the full inquest in London into the death of ex-FSB officerAlexander Litvinenko in November 2006 has been postponed from May 1st to October 2nd. If you read Russian websites and goverment/media pronouncements on this the reason for the delay is the foot-dragging by the British government in providing paperwork the inquest needs. That's true, and the presiding coroner, Justice Sir Robert Owen, has complained about that. What the Russian commentators are not mentioning is that their own Investigative Committee, which is an interested party, have just sent in 15,000 pages of evidence, in Russian, which has to be translated. That takes a bit of time.

The British government also seems to be trying to stymie the inquest by raising a PII certificate - Public Interest Immunity, that is. The idea would be that certain evidence should not be made available either to the public, NOR to the other interested parties, who would not be told what it is they are not allowed to see - on grounds of national security...perhaps.

The barrister for Litvinenko's widow says that what is really going on here is an attempt by our government to keep relations with Russia sweet because of trade agreements that we need. But this, he says, would be tantamount to giving Russia a licence to kill. After all, the official position here is that it was the Russian State that ordered Litvinenko's poisoning with Polonium 210. 

Robert Owen has yet to announce whether he will abide by the government's PII request. As to keeping the Russians sweet, how annoying, then, that asylum was granted to another Russian oligarch, Andrei Borodin...One of the problems for the Russians is that British courts and immigration judges don't necessarily do what the 'executive' tells them. Which makes it all rather unpredictable.

The Russian position was that it was Boris Berezovsky who wanted Litvinenko dead because...well, because he was fed up with Litvinenko whinging about the cut to the very generous allowance Berezovsky had given him for some years. Berezovsky, whow as also an interested party at the inquest and had his barrister to represent him, of course denied that.

Berezovsky is now dead. Heart attack brought on by natural causes? suicide? murder? Choose your pick. And everyone is. There are reasons to suspect any of them, and depending on your choice, I will tell you who you are. Since I don't yet know which of the three it is, I presumably am suffering from a crisis of identity.

Brits quail at the thought of eating horse meat, because horses are our friends. Ditto dogs and cats. Not ditto cattle, pigs, sheep, little curly lambs. Mind you, we buy the meat pre-cut in supermarkets so the bits don't look like the animals they once were. But whatever it is/was, it felt fear and possibly pain. Yet of course, having no sense of itself in time, to use Peter Singer's phrase, animals are not aware of a biography curtailed. Does that matter?

The thing about horse is that it has been turning up in burgers and lasagnes, processed, that said they were beef. Criminal or cheeky? If there's a label, the contents ought to match the writing. There's also the worry that meat coming from the USA, which once ran round the race track - the meat not the USA - may contain nasty medication that is no good for human consumers, and may not have been that good for the horses either.

It's all about what is cheap: and processed meat is that, and filling, and convenient, and fattening and some would say, tasty. But that is subjective. If people ate vegetables, and meat only occasionally, the cost might be the same. But they'd have to cook and they don't know how.They might not even have a kitchen to do it in. Many people would say they don't have time, although it's not clear where the time has gone.

So what's going to change? No idea. More inspectors (cut by the Government)? No idea. Though between the Government, Local Authorities, the Food Standards Agency, supermarkets and farmers there's lots of passing the buck. But buck is tasy, isn't it? And healthy. And sadly it all belongs to the Queen.