Her real name’s probably Fintan.
You wouldn’t put anything past the latest instalment of Eurovision. The Icelandic entry was a notably frank paean to the joys of sado-masochism. The co-presenter was that little blond leprechaun from BoyZone. He was so short he made Carrie, towering over him, look like a drag act There was something too perfectly feminine about her. You kept on staring at her neck for signs of activity from an Adam’s apple. Michael Maloney and Haydn Gwynne played a couple about to set out on holiday who suddenly find they have half an hour to spare. Truss used the time to examine contrasting attitudes to the clock: she is a compulsive worrier, insanely superstitious and fanatically punctual; he is seemingly more laid-back and unhurried, although it turns out that his apparent relaxation is at least partly a pose to torment her.

Their battle of wills lasts a neat 30 minutes, as he runs baths, lets the cat out, goes down to the shops to buy milk – anything to delay the evil hour of departure; she, meanwhile, is rapidly losing her grip on sanity.As the minutes ticked by, and roles were (a little implausibly) reversed, you worried that the title might hold some sinister double meaning: a countdown to murder, perhaps. All in all, interesting as a play which negated its own raison d’etre – how could it matter that it was set in real time when you were too busy listening to check your watch?. Gerry Adams embraced electoral triumph on the Friday with a speech delivered in Gaelic and English. A day later you realised where he got the idea from, when Carrie, uber-presenter of the Eurovision Song Contest (BBC1, Sat), made part of her keynote welcome in Gaelic It was either that or staggeringly bad Danish. (Although no worse, in fairness, than that of the Danish entrant himself, who sang a song about a man who falls in love with a telephone operator, delivered in the rap idiom; sort of Hans Christian Muthafuckason). (I’m not sure if The Afternoon Shift bothers with them; then again, the fact that I haven’t noticed is significant in itself.)Time is not always an issue: not on Radio 3, with its long tradition – now, sadly, being stamped out – of refusing to take any notice of the clock.

Not in plays and stories, either; blunting the flow of real time is one of the purposes of fiction.An exception to that rule was Thirty Minutes to Kill (Radio 4, Tuesday), a brief comedy in real time by Lynne Truss. Hence, on Radio 4, you get time- checks during news programmes such as PM and The World at One, but not during other live programmes, such as Kaleidoscope. But public time-keeping is no longer our primary source of chronological information: instead, we look at our wrists.
One place where time is still publicly announced is on the radio. Time- checks are such a familiar part of the background that we don’t stop to think about the point of them. In the mornings, it seems obvious enough: they’re to let you know how close your deadlines are, at a time of day when most people are in a hurry.

Even here, there’s room for speculation as to how far we rely on timechecks to tell us the time, and how far we appreciate them as adding to the general breakfast-time sense of bustle.At other times of day, the time-check takes on a different role – it’s there to impart a sense of immediacy. But with the mass-ownership of watches, time has been broken up, individualised: just as we all keep our own consciences now, instead of relying on the Church to distinguish good and evil for us, so we all keep our own time of day. Of course, just as we need some common core of morality for society to function, so we need some shared notion of time, or we’d spend our lives missing appointments and finding that we hadn’t videoed the last five minutes of favourite television programmes; so most people check their watches against public time-keeping every now and then to make sure they’re roughly in line with everybody else. Week after week we have tried to tempt the MP for West Ham to criticise the Blairite ascendancy in his party Week after week he has refused the bait. Though towards the end the strain was showing – we had to spray Banks with cold water after one particularly provocative interview with Jack Straw – his loyalty never wavered He now has his reward. I’m sure that he would like to know that I will be free on Cup Final Day..