Portland Place ASBO Crew

Every morning at nine Eddie Mair has to run up to James Naughtie and John Humphrys and towel the sweat off their torsoes as they leave the Today studio. Then he has to wring the phlegm out of their foam microphone shields, without gloves. He's their fag and he has to wear scratchy grey shorts. For the rest of the day he fetches and carries for them while they make disparaging comments about him: "Hurry up bursary boy", "Are you really the future of radio news broadcasting? You'll never get on Today, we even let Sarah Montague co-present and she's a Girl' 'And Evan Davis and he's a Gay' 'we only let you work in News because our dads say we've got to be nice to you, otherwise you'd be with all the other oiks at Radio Five', 'Yeah, one word from us and you'd be going to Manchester with all the other white socks'. Sometimes they get together with Robert Robinson and play the Soggy Biscuit Game together - the difference being that it's boy Mair who has to eat the marinated McVitie, just before he goes on air at teatime.

It isn't only young Eddie that gets it. J and J are always beating up the You and Yours team in the corridors, they can get a lot of punches and kicks in the five minutes before the World at One. Then they sneak into Martha Kearney's empty office and sniff her cycle shorts, etc. They're pretty much out of control: just in the last week they swapped Peter White's guide dog for a dead sheep, threw Andrew Marr's briefcase on top of a bus shelter, and set fire to Melvyn Bragg's hair in seventeen different places. They bully Mark Lawson something chronic, they don't hit him, but just say: 'Mariella Frostrup, she's your mum', and he always bursts into tears. Those drawings of Sue MacGregor on the wall of the third floor gents were definitely Humphrys' doing, as he got pastels for Christmas and only he would reference Courbet's 'L'Origine du Monde' like that. And the one in pencil of Kate Adie above the urinal, you can tell from the cross-hatch shading under her left one that it's Naughtie's work. Everyone knows it was them who vandalised Nicolas Parsons that time. All the From Our Own Correspondent journalists are broadcasters who willingly took a posting in countries that smell awful just to get away from them. They wouldn't be getting away with it if Brian Redhead was still in charge...