Almost as interesting as her story is the way in which it has been laid out. Monday’s opening episode began with an impassioned, rather racy extract from one of Matheson’s love letters to Sackville-West, before going on to sketch out her Scots heritage, cosmopolitan upbringing, open nature and her authorship of an incisive early text on broadcasting. The majority of the episode, though, was focused on Reith’s early years, exploring his rampant ambition, comparative lack of education and – surprisingly – a 10-year, live-in “obsessive friendship” with a man “with awfully pretty eyes” (according to Reith’s diary) which “with 21st-century hindsight, appears to have been a relationship charged with homoeroticism”. The suggestion that this repressive relationship might be “the disquieting subtext behind some of Reith’s moral crusades decades later” seemed a mite bald, but you could see where it was coming from. 

By way of razor-sharp contrast, the quite brilliant Matheson had nothing but sunshine beamed down on her. After Oxford, her first job was with MI5 heroically setting up a bureau in Rome during the First World War (there’s a rainbow-framed picture of her even now on MI5’s website, marking LGBT+ History Month). She went on to become pioneering MP Nancy Astor’s much-loved and admired political secretary. Her appointment by Reith to one of the BBC’s most influential early roles, must have seemed to her entirely full of promise. But, by the close of yesterday’s episode, there was a doom-laden sense of these two complete opposites moving like continents towards one another, a major earthquake inevitable. I can hardly wait to hear more of this brilliantly told tale.

In Counting Them In (World Service, Saturday), Mike Wooldridge marked the 40th anniversary of the Falklands War in the most positive way possible by returning to the British outpost in the South Atlantic to report on how much things have changed in the decades since the conflict. Wooldridge’s opening assessment, that the Falklands now ranks, by some measures, as “one of the wealthiest communities on Earth”, rather took the breath away. In 40 years the islands have transformed from a struggling, impoverished, rocky outcrop with more sheep than people to a thriving community of 3,500, made up of 60-plus nationalities with a GDP that, in 2018, was per capita the fifth highest in the world. Much of this, it seems, is down to the post-war declaration of a 150-mile fishing zone around the islands. Trawlers from as far afield as Taiwan and South Korea now pay small fortunes to fish the rich waters.