THINGS I have learned from Radio 4 this week. The average age of the British farmer is 56 (according to The World at One on Wednesday). Medusa used to have tusks and sometimes even a lion’s mane as well as a writhing nest of snakes for hair (Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics, Tuesday). And crickets, indeed, many insects, are utterly promiscuous, while the Right Whale is the owner of the world’s largest testicles, roughly the size of a small family car.

But as entomologist Doctor Karim Vahed also pointed out on Nature Table on Monday evening, that is still only one per cent of the whale’s body mass. By contrast, the tuberous bush cricket may only be three centimetres long, but his testes are the size of baked beans. That translates as 14% of the male cricket’s body mass. Quite something to boast about.

Nature Table offers one of the more entertaining approaches to natural history. As it is presented by comedian Sue Perkins rather than Sir David Attenborough, it is less interested in the brutal business of animal life and death set against scenic backdrops. Instead, it is concerned with quirky extremes that lend themselves to a good punchline.

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As well as bush crickets, Monday’s show bigged up vultures. They have a bad reputation, zoologist Lucy Cooke admitted. They also practice urohidrosis, which, according to Cooke, means – look away now if you are squeamish – “crapping on your legs to keep cool.”

It’s one solution, I suppose. “To be honest, that’s the only way I got through Glastonbury,” Perkins added.

But vultures are also the “clean-up forensic units of the Serengeti,” Cooke suggested.

Their stomach acid is incredibly strong. Strong enough to digest bones and even metal, but also, and importantly given that their diet largely consists of dead things, botulism, bubonic plague, rabies, cholera and hepatitis.

They can even digest anthrax, Perkins pointed out. “But we don’t know if they can digest Metallica.”

Back to Medusa. On Wednesday, Natalie Haynes started her new series on the classical world by examining her story and how it has been retold down the ages. It’s one that has been increasingly sexed up, she suggested.

“I think it’s incredibly hard to find a contemporary Medusa that is asexual,” Haynes pointed out. “The best example I have ever come across is the Lego version. We see her briefly in The Lego Movie and, to be fair, Lego Medusa is not minxy.

“But almost every other version of modern Medusa, she’s played by a model. She’s played by Uma Thurman, she’s played by Rihanna, she’s somebody incredibly gorgeous.”

In other words, tusks don’t tend to feature.

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As ever, Haynes was keen to reclaim Medusa from the monstrosity we have imposed on her. After all, her origin story is that she was a rape victim turned into a monster by the God Poseidon.

But then you could never accuse the Greek Gods of being “woke” on the whole, could you?

Listen Out For: Dinner with Dylan, Radio 4, today, 3pm. Part of an ongoing Bob Dylan love-in ahead of his 80th birthday on Monday, Jon Canter’s drama about three middle-aged “Bobaholics” stars Richard Curtis, no less, playing himself.