Life's simple pleasures are rarely simple, at least in the world of the media. So in this summer-resistant summer - can you get a cream with a below-zero SPF, to encourage the sun? - as cricket-y listeners try to settle into the day-long seasonal pleasures of Test Match Special (BBC Radio 4, medium- and longwave), it's with an unshakeable consciousness that the BBC's God-given right to deliver such pleasures has been revoked by Mammon.
On British TV the live cricket has been swallowed up by commercial broadcasters. Similarly, on radio there, the opposition from commercial station, Talk-Sport, has also resulted in an erosion. A sign of the times is that the new chief at BBC Radio 5 Live is an expert on . . . go on, guess. International diplomacy? Digital technology? The Bosman rule? Nope: he's a tried and tested negotiator of broadcasting rights, ready to transfer some of the licence-payers' cash to needy organisations such as the FA Premiership, the Rugby Football Union and FIFA. And all this when I have at last joined the ranks of listeners who don't really give a damn about cricket but have come to love the mellow company of the gang at Test Match Special, so memorably parodied three decades ago by the Monty Python crew for the rising curve of their intoxication and their unending fascination with the weather. "Rain!" "Rain!" "Rain!" they'd chorus.
For the present test series between England and the West Indies, at least, there is another sweet vibe to accompany the happy musings of Old Englanders as they consult their Wisden, and it is, logically enough, a West Indian one. Viv Richards is possibly the only ex-cricketer whose name I'd immediately recognise (OK, yer man Botham too), thanks to my childhood friendship with a Barbadian, displaced in New Jersey. And listen here: he (that's Richards, not my old mate) is a lovely, funny broadcaster, adding multiculturally to the occasion.
Like when Ambrose (or was it Walsh?) approached the crease to bowl, described by the BBC's terribly-English play-by-play man as having his "dreads bobbing in the breeze". We could hear a snigger in the background; then when the "action" (inaction really) had passed, Richards piped up, laughing affectionately: "You kill me, man - `his dreads bobbing in the breeze'!" Mocking the colonials was something he achieved with charming precision on several more occasions. What's more, in the musical chairs that seems to afflict a cricket commentary box as lunchtime approaches, there was actually a Guinean woman talking us through the balls. I think that means, officially, their times etc.
I'm only beginning to make sense of the game, which, after loads of build-up for a thrilling finish petered out early in inconclusive "bad light", and in which it was ages before I realised that "marcustrescothick" was the name of an England player and not of a new surgical procedure to treat cricket elbow. And I still have absolutely no (relevant) mental picture conjured up by the phrase "silly mid-on". But, by golly, I think I know good radio by now, and I'll be back for the next match, thanks.
It's not just in the direction of sports that BBC radio seems consistently able to throw extraordinary resources (as in loadsamoney and heapsavoices). The other night, when BBC Radio 3 decided it would do one of its patented artsy filler documentaries about the Mona Lisa, it gave the programme a travel budget, a veritable gallery-full of experts to interview and even a gen-u-ine art critic to present it.
Mona Lisa: The Unvarnished Truth (BBC Radio 3, Wednesday) didn't quite live up to its billing and its budget. That was perhaps the fault of said critic, Louisa Buck, whose own narrative inserts were intelligent enough, but you always had a feeling that her last sentence or two would be launched with "In the end . . ."
But that was scarcely crippling, not when a programme could trot along like this one, dropping in vox pops from the Louvre amid old clips of Kenneth "Civilisation" Clarke and various kooky bits of theory and practice from the 20th and 21st centuries. The Mona Lisa is a self-portrait; it's Leonardo's mammy; it's his male lover; it's a young woman all right, and she's pregnant. One Japanese video artist told us how he had combined various of these ideas to adapt Mona Lisa into a self-portrait of a pregnant man.
Seemingly such post-modern "interactivity" is the most the majority of us are ever going to get out of the painting, since we were told several times by those in the know that to appreciate the magic of the real thing you have to see it up close and out of the frame. While Louvre director Pierre Rosenberg readily acknowledged that the current viewing conditions are "a scandal", the new purpose-built setting that will thrust the painting back into the headlines next year does not seem to involve passing the 500-year-old wooden panel among its 15,000 daily visitors.
Generally, this was Mona Lisa's history without the mystery, but including some fascinating details: the painting was already copied and parodied in its earliest years - Leonardo himself is said to have executed and/or owned a nude version. Then there were the more recent artistic and commercial applications, from Duchamps and Leger to Warhol and biscuit tins. Last year the New Yorker did a cover with Monica Lewinsky as Lisa - prompting a dodgy but apposite comment from one expert on Mona Lisa as an "empty box" for our age: "The entire US is trying to fill this face with whatever it wants."