STRIKING lines heard on the radio this week, part one: “My father thought the art business was for gays and weirdos. And of course he’s absolutely on target there …”

That was Scottish-born artist Jock McFadyen talking to Edi Stark in Stark Talk on Radio Scotland last Saturday evening.

Having spent some time Northern Ireland of late, I have started feeling a little more fondly towards Radio Scotland. The national broadcaster is thankfully never as egregiously couthy as daytime Radio Ulster.

And half an hour spent in the company of Jock McFadyen only cemented that good will. McFadyen, who graced these pages earlier this year, has long been an outspoken, willfully provocative (see above) and always entertaining talking head, and Stark, as ever, got the best out of him in the latest of her long-form interviews.

The Herald:

She covered his growing up beside the shipyards, his failures at school, the time he nearly died on his motorcycle, the collapse of his first marriage and squatting in Chelsea in the 1970s.

“If you’re going to squat you don’t go and squat in Peckham,” McFadyen pointed out. “You choose a good address.”

Somewhere in the middle of all this, McFadyen even discussed why he paints. He’s not big on meaning and narrative, it seems.

“I suppose as a journalist one wants to have a story,” he gently chided Stark. “And maybe the public is the same. They want to look at pictures and say, ‘What does this mean?’ And the idea that it means nothing is slightly disappointing.”

As long as they look, of course. How, Stark asked him, did he want viewers to react to his work?

“I’d like them to be shocked actually. All painters want to make paintings that can’t be walked past.”

Striking lines heard on the radio this week, part two: “Itsy Bitsy Bad Girl XOX got her labia tattooed live on her Insta stories last week. I don’t need to tell you how many likes that got.”

Katy Brand, pictured above, and Katherine Parkinson’s original comedy Influencers on Radio 4 yesterday morning had a lot of fun with social media. Brand and Parkinson played the wannabe influencers of the title setting up their own podcast and hoping to snatch followers from an indisposed rival who they discover has just been rushed to hospital: “Oh my God, she’s only 39. She eats placenta. Not even just her own placenta. She gets frozen placenta.”

You get the picture.

The result was very bougie bougie, very Radio 4 and very of the moment. Then again, it wasn’t above chucking a bit where both Brand and Parkinson get drunk on freebie gin . Some forms of comedy never go out of date, it seems.

Listen Out For: Things Fell Apart, Radio 4, Tuesday, 9am. Jon Ronson returns with a new eight-part series that explores the origins of our current culture wars, which traces a line from the son of an evangelical leader who had a desire to make Hollywood movies in the early 1970s to the assault on Washington DC by Donald Trump’s supporters.