Beginning of first hour missing from this recording.
Postscript to a wonderful diatribe on stalkers: "In the past, when I was younger and rather lovelier than I am now, I did have some very strange incidents. There was a woman who classically and famously removed all of her clothes in the reception area of Broadcasting House. This gave me enormous status, as you might imagine, with the security people who were on duty, because she was a very attractive woman in a kind of page 3 sort of way. For years after that, I had to endure the security people saying, when I came in to the building, 'Well, hello Mr. Peel. Any of your friends likely to be popping in this evening?' And, of course, they never did."
JP couldn't recognise the drum and bass track after the news. It turns out the track was from Stakka + K.Tee and was also played on his BBC Radio One show on 15 February 2000.
(JP: 'Just reading in the paper, before I started recording this programme, about how the Beckhams, Becks and Posh, are being harassed by some woman, and for once I actually had some sympathy for them (although there are times when I'd quite like to harass Beckham meself actually, with a blunt instrument). I do occasionally get that sort of thing meself. Sometimes they can be very scary. There's a woman: she's not after me specifically, as you might imagine (she's not that diseased), but she's after people that she assumes that I know, which involves almost everybody in showbiz, and I think at the moment it's Paul McCartney that's the focus of her attention, and she keeps sending me great bags full of stuff at where I work in London just full of junk really, stuff that she wants me to pass on to Paul. Obviously I don't know Paul McCartney at all, really, and certainly got no prospect of regularly seeing him to hand over these bags of junk. There's a department in the BBC whose responsibility it is to send these things back to people with a note, "Thank you so very much indeed for your polite enquiry," the very BBC kind of approach to these things instead of just chucking them in the bin. There've been a couple of times when I've kept things that she sent for Paul, I have to be honest. There was a Latin dictionary, and at the time our Flossie was mildly interested in Latin, so I kept that: it would have been sold for 10p, so it didn't seem entirely unreasonable, and I think there was a pencil sharpener....but by and large they just send all of the stuff back to her again. But she's now started not just leaving the stuff but phoning up to ascertain whether or not it had been delivered to Paul. Obviously it hasn't, and the person who answers the phone, who is a woman, says, "Well, we looked through it and we weren't quite sure what to do, so we are sending it back to you," and she's now started screaming over the phone: she obviously assumes that all women other than herself are lesbians, and she says she doesn't want lesbians touching all of the valuable stuff that she has sorted out to send to Paul. I'll let you know how this one develops anyway, because it is quite interesting.')
(JP: 'I have had actually one other stalker. This was about five or six years ago: she was a Greek woman living in London, and she would send me letters in Greek, and obviously as I don't really read Greek, these were not of any particular interest. She sent me Valentine cards too. Then she started turning up at the BBC and asking to speak to me: she did get through a couple of times on the phone..."Hello, I love you," she would go, "You are my fiancé, and you must come to my house when you finish your programme." I'd say to her, "I think you must have mistaken me for somebody else. We've never met, I'm not your fiancé. There's no point in sending me letters and Valentine cards in Greek 'cos I don't read or speak Greek." This didn't deter her at all, and she then started sending me money, which is a tendency I'd have liked to encourage really, but I realised I shouldn't do that sort of thing. I'd then have to pretend to be a part of the BBC whose responsibility it was to return unsolicited gifts of money. In fact, I even stood next to her once in the reception area of Broadcasting House, and she had no idea it was me, so she'd obviously become just sort of vaguely fixated on my voice droning away on the radio in the way that it is doing at the moment. But at least I was luckier than my pal Paul Burnett, who now alas no longer works for the BBC so I don't see him any more. He was once going to collect his car from the back of the building, and a woman stepped out of the shadows and threw a can of paint over him. He was obviously rather displeased because it had ruined a suit of clothes, but I thought, at least I've got a fan anyway, somebody who loves me, only to discover later on that she'd mistaken him for somebody else, somebody called Diddy David Hamilton, and put this can of paint over him for nothing at all. To make it worse, the same woman did the same thing again a month later, mistaking Paul Burnett for Diddy David Hamilton.')
(JP: 'I went out to get a cotton bud to stick in my ear. I know it's supposed to be a bad thing to do, but when you get to my age, any kind of thrill that you can get is worth taking a bit of a risk to get. It's difficult to say: how do you quantify these things? I get almost as much pleasure from doing my ears as I do from scratching the stuff out from between my toes when my athlete's foot gets bad. I think that's probably the greater pleasure of the two. There are one or two other ones I don't think I'll describe to you on this programme, but perhaps some time, if we ever meet, I'll be able to explain them to you.')