Am I the only person that cares that BBC7 broadcast the final episode of the superb In the Chair with the last five minutes missing (and, oddly, substituted with the last minute of a different episode altogether)?

Certainly the BBC don't care, as I emailed them about it and nobody replied.

And nobody else has mentioned it.

Yet this was the last five minutes of a murder mystery. Which presumably contained some final reveal, an unmasking, a pay-off. It is probably going to drive me mad.

Unless I buy the bloody thing on CD. Which is perhaps what the BBC intended all along.

Alright then, I'll buy it. But when BBC7 is threatened with closure by the DG, I won't be signing any petitions.

Network Rail say that there should be obligatory questions about level crossings in the driving theory test, due to the number of people making last-minute dashes across level crossings every year.

No, Network Rail, no. The drivers doing the frankly terrifying things on the above BBC report are not risking their lives because they don't know about level crossings. They are doing it because, pure and simple, they are twats.

These are the same drivers who weave in and out of lanes at 110mph on the motorway; the ones who speed onto roundabouts to nip ahead of approaching cars; the ones who drive at 45mph in residential areas and occasionally kill people.

It's not that I care if they get hit by a train. It may sound heartless, but it is factually undeniable that they deserve to die. It's the people around them who don't, and that's why the solution has bugger all to do with the theory test. The solution is to make it illegal and take people's licenses off them when they do it - plain and simple, same as drink driving and for exactly the same reasons.

It wouldn't sort out the idiotic schoolkids featured at the end of the report, but it would be a start.

A Year 7 group went a little off the rails in a composition workshop I did with them last week, so it was pure joy to turn up today to a heap of letters of apology, apparently written under the impression that I might be too upset to ever come back and teach them again.

It is a glorious catalogue of illiteracy and finger pointing, but a few deserve special mention, like the boy who wrote:

I appoligise for talking when you were talking and to prove i can stick to this appoligy i will not make commentes on anything you say and if someone is talking or doing anything inapropreat i will leave them alone and let them get in trouble

Next up, a fine demonstration of laying the blame elsewhere (a future politician, I reckon):

I am sorry for the very childish behavior (sic) of my fellow class mates. They behaved very silly and I hope they will treat you with more respect.

My personal favourite makes reference to an incident when I was trying to demonstrate how a minor key could make a song sound sad:

...I am also sorry about Matthew saying "Emily said thats the sort of thing emos listen to" and am sorry for that disrupting the class what I actually said was "that sound like he's realy deppresed". Then to myself "kind of emo style" (as we were thinking about styles)

Finally, a special mention for the girl who signs her letter "many sinful apologies...". Wouldn't expect anything less in a faith school.

Lest this blog become a series of rants about Woman's Hour, and following another road rage incident this morning, I have decided to set up a different blog exposing the horrific gender stereotyping that goes on for an hour each weekday on BBC Radio 4.

It is here.

I realise that, in order for this undertaking to succeed, I am going to have to listen to Woman's Hour on a regular basis. Deliberately. And yes, it might drive me actually mad. It might even kill me. But maybe, just maybe, I'll take this evil fossil of a radio programme with me, and I am prepared to take that bullet for the good of humankind, single-issue male stereotype that I am.

Hurray! I'm a man after all.

I find this story rather wonderful and cheering. Not everyone on the internet is horrible! etc.

I know that publicity tends to exaggerate, but companies ought to know that there are limits. Today a brochure for "haart of bedford" (sic) dropped onto my doormat, advertising their services as estate agents; whichever consultancy firm came up with their slogans made an unfortunate miscalculation with this one:

there's never been a better time to buy your new home. (sic)

Given how widely it has been reported that the exact opposite is true, I think that could be what we call stretching credulity too far...

One of the problems of driving a car is that I occasionally find myself listening to a radio programme that I would never consider turning on in other circumstances but which is so compellingly dreadful that I have to keep listening. Undoubtedly the biggest culprit, which invariably sees me yelling at my car radio and crashing into road barriers, is Woman's Hour.

What is this programme even for? Is it there because the rest of Radio 4's heady mix of politics, analysis, culture, drama and gardening just won't appeal to the poor dears who stay at home to bathe the children and peel the potatoes? Of course, we don't need a Gentleman's Hour - we have The World At One in which serious issues of the day are discussed; but thank goodness that Radio 4 have put aside an hour, at least, for those of lesser intellect to hear about more domestic, frivolous concerns.

One recent edition that nearly made me throw my car off a motorway bridge had Emma Thompson's mother telling a truly horrendous anecdote about a time she inserted a clove of garlic into her bottom to cure her piles, but - my! - imagine the dreadful smell when she passed wind! Is that really suitable subject matter for daytime radio? Is it? IS IT?

But it's not the sheer randomness and silliness of the content that drives me up the wall. It is the fact that this programme is habitually sexist in a way that even Jeremy Clarkson couldn't get away with; even if the programme's very existence didn't implicitly reinforce a gender stereotype, its discussions regularly take a whole load other other mythical gender distinctions and shamelessly repeat them as if they're scientific fact.

I was pretty damn cross about last week's "why women want a bigger kitchen" discussion (why, pray, am I not allowed a bigger kitchen too?) but yesterday went a whole step further in a discussion of "why women don't write as many letters to newspapers as men do".

First up with a neat answer was Sarah Sands of the London Evening Standard, who explained that "time is a big issue". Apparently, women don't write letters to newspapers because "they're just too busy".

Doing what, exactly? At no point did Ms Sands stop to explain what it is that means that men are so much less busy than women, except in a vague sentence that seemed to imply that all men are students or retired. She clearly has an unquestioningly Wodehousian world view in which women do all the work while men sit around writing letters to the Telegraph.

Without pausing to justify her illogical theory, she went on to add that with women "there's this innate modesty" which means they're less prepared to mouth off about things which annoy them. Which is so laughably inaccurate that I might have chuckled heartily, but for the fact that the Observer's Stephen Pritchard leapt in to agree that "women have a natural desire to be more considered and reflective", a brazen fallacy compounded by the patronising edge in his voice which suggested that he was prepared to tell the little ladies what they wanted to hear if it kept them out of the way while us men got on with running the country.

Not one to make a sweeping generalisation about women without modestly dragging his own gender through the mud, Pritchard added: "men are single-issue people... we tend to be incredibly blinkered!" Unlike, presumably, Sarah Sands of the London Evening Standard who believes that women do all the work in the world. In the same simpering tone which, horrifically, seemed calculated to forge a path into Jenni Murray's knickers, he went on that "women have this tremendous ability to do half a dozen things at once which men certainly don't share!"

How bloody dare he!!! I couldn't do my job if I wasn't able to do half a dozen things at once! Besides which, if women are able to do half a dozen things at once, why aren't they writing letters to newspapers at the same time as doing all those other things they're so busy with?

I'm the last person to advocate equality as sameness and know that, broadly speaking, men and women have important physical and emotional differences. But if you were to believe the sweeping, self-contradictory, discriminatory, patronising crap spouted about men and women on Woman's Hour you would form a view of gender that was last fashionable around the beginning of the 20th century, the very thing that women chained themselves to railings to escape from in a brave yet apparently uncharacteristically single-issue manner.

The feminist in me is half-inclined to chain myself to railings outside Broadcasting House until Radio 4 pull the programme from the airwaves, but time is an issue as I'm so busy, so instead I have written a considered, reflective blog about it (I'm too innately modest to write to the Telegraph).

Shit - I'm a woman.

I am not entirely surprised by the success of Fox's celebrated, Golden Globe-winning series Glee, merely rather depressed. For those of you who have been spared it so far, the concept is this (imagine it scribbled on a napkin): a Spanish teacher takes over the school's Glee Club (that is what Americans call a school choir) which includes a group of misfits who argue, make up and then, to round off each episode, sing.

The same napkin would certainly also have had space for the everso predictable character breakdown - there's the cool kid who plays football but deep down would rather be singing, and the pretty girl who's a bit individual so gets picked on by the sporty girls; then there's the sassy, streetwise girl and the nerdy-boy-who-gets-bullied. And just to make sure a few minorities are covered, there's disabled boy and Asian girl ("what's your skill?" asked cool kid at one point; "er..." she stuttered in broken English. "Never mind," he interrupted with a patronising grin, "we'll find something!")

But it isn't the cynical, school-drama-plus-music-by-numbers formula that depressed me. It is the fact that the series has not one iota of wit or irony. For example, in an early scene we saw the Spanish teacher sit up in bed with a big grin as he had a flash of inspiration for the Glee Club's new name - "Of course!" he gasped, "New Directions!" - and I laughed out loud because I thought it was a deliberate joke that the character had just uttered a name unfortunately close in sound to "Nude Erections". I was already imagining the hilarious results that were about to ensue when the hapless teacher announced his Nude Erections to the football team.

But no; having no sense of irony (and in this instance self-awareness), the programme evidently expected us to share the teacher's eureka moment and gasp in delight at his perfect idea. Gee! New Directions! How... fresh!

In another scene, the newly-reformed and unfortunately-titled Glee Club performed a pretty decent rendition of Sit Down You're Rocking the Boat; as it finished, nerdy kid announced without irony, "we suck". And instead of leaping in and reassuring them "no way, most schoolkids would kill to be able to sing that well together, in tune and with so much energy on no rehearsal!" the Spanish teacher just nodded with a wry, disappointed smile and said that they would get better.

How were we supposed to know that their runthrough was, within the non-ironic, sugary world of the drama, a disaster? All became clear when, in a totally unforseeable development at the end of the episode, they all sorted out their problems and learned how to sing in a way that didn't suck. Because then we heard what good singing is meant to sound like: backing harmonies close-miked and compressed to the point that they cease to sound like human voices and undoubtedly supplemented by several professional singers, lead vocals auto-tuned, given an artificial acoustic and mixed as flatteringly as possible with the professional backing group which had miraculously appeared to replace their earlier lone pianist. The kind of sound no school ensemble, however good, would EVER make.

In another context I might have thought it was a deliberate moment of high camp, suspension-of-disbelief silliness and it might have been funny, or at least bearable, but naturally I was meant to be in floods of non-ironic tears and it was all I could do not to choke on my scowl.

No doubt in future weeks the Spanish teacher will find true love, the cool kid will realise there's more to life than football and get it on with the pretty girl, the nerdy kid will be accepted for who he is, the Asian girl will learn to speak English and the disabled boy will learn to walk. (The sassy girl will stay exactly the same.) I'm going to give it a miss - if I want to watch a genuinely moving people-taught-to-sing drama I'll watch Young At Heart, and if I want the camp version there's Sister Act.

And anyone who thinks I'm being snobbish should know that I watched Legally Blonde the Musical last week and loved every second.