Will Romesh Ranganathan make a go of Radio 2's Saturday morning show?

But proof, I guess that in replacing Claudia Winkleman, Ranganathan is aware the audience might not be the same as the one that tunes in for his late evening Romesh Ranganathan: For the Love of Hip Hop gig.

To be fair, he did play the odd hip hop tune last Saturday. Outkast, Arrested Development and Pras Michel all turned up.

And Ranganathan seemed delighted when House of Pain’s Jump Around was selected for the initial Family Three-Tunes audience participation slot, though that feature went slightly awry when the spinning wheel used to decide which song should be played didn’t work properly.

Claudia Winkleman (Image: free)

By the time it was sorted the eventual winner, nine-year-old Charlie, announced: “I don’t know what’s happening.”

But it was a slight hiccup and it was quickly clear that Ranganathan is a safe pair of hands for Radio 2’s Saturday morning schedule. If anything, this first show was a little too safe. As well as phoning his mum - isn’t that Rylan’s schtick? - Ranganathan invited friend and fellow Radio 2 broadcaster Rob Beckett on as his first guest, which, to be honest, felt a bit too chummy, as did their conversation.

The pair of them even ganged up on Sally Traffic at one point, trying to put her off during one of her traffic reports.

“You didn’t get this with Claudia, did you?” Beckett chipped in at one point.

At times the show felt a little too hyper. But maybe that’s to be expected on your first day at work. You want to make an impression, don’t you? Come back in a couple of weeks and Ranganathan will have settled in.

“It was chaotic, it was crazy, but I think it went all right,” reckoned Ranganathan himself.

Back to proper 1980s classics. On Absolute Radio on Sunday night Tim Burgess was joined by Martin Fry to discuss ABC’s 1982 album Lexicon of Love in the latest episode of Tim Burgess’s Listening Party.

Lexicon of Love, as well as being one of the greatest albums ever made (says me), was a key romantic text in my own life. The nights I spent with my best beloved listening to that record.

As a result, I can always listen to Fry talking about it. And he’s had to do so a lot over the years. So, he has his spiel well polished now. Much like the record.

Every song, Fry argued, was attempting to be a mini pop opera. “We were ambitious … We approached Trevor Horn because we wanted to get a producer that could make us shiny and golden,” Fry suggested. “We wanted to be as Vegas as possible.”

What, Burgess asked him, was he thinking when he was making the album?

“What I was thinking was pure desperation,” Fry said. “I had one shot. I was living in Sheffield and either you became a professional footballer or a hairdresser. And I was good at neither.”

READ MORE TEDDY JAMIESON

10 Scottish gigs to blow your mind in May - and where to get tickets

I realised I had a problem: Zutons' Dave McCabe on dealing with demons

John Burnside on the day he nearly died: A feeling of ‘I am going’

David Bowie turned up when ABC were recording The Look of Love, it seems. It was Bowie, Fry suggested, who came up with the song’s counter-rhythm. Let’s choose to believe that.

In any case, Lexicon of Love is the sound of being young and in love. For me, at any rate. It still makes me feel that way more than 40 years later. "Shoot that Poison Arrow to my heaaaart."

Finally, cities were the subject of Monday morning’s Start the Week on Radio 4. “What is so fabulous about cities is that you are exposed all the time to so much difference,” suggested the architect Amanda Levete. “It’s so important, I think, when you design that you don’t design a monoculture, that there is mixity, that there is diversity,” she added, before giving a stout defence of the idea of the 15-Minute City.

Mixity is my new favourite word.

Levete was also approving of Paris moving from being a city for cars to a cycling city, a move pushed through by the city’s mayor Anne Hidalgo.

“She doesn’t really care what people think,” Levete argued approvingly. “She has a vision and she has enacted it. And that is what you have to do if you want to bring about change,” Levete argued. “People will come around to understand the benefits of a slower way of moving.”

Hmm, I don’t see that flying on the front page of the Daily Express, do you?

Listen Out For Gary Little at Large, Radio 4, Wednesday, 11pm

The Glaswegian comedian starts a new series in which he reflects on life in and out of prison in the first of four 15-minute shows recorded at The Stand comedy club in the city earlier this year.