MORE of us are listening to more radio.

The latest audience figures suggest we're turning back to sound only.

Some of us have never been away, owing to the quality of the pictures being so much better on radio.

All the characters in a play are exactly as you imagine them, even on the occasions when the actor's face is known. Dame Judy Dench looks nothing like any Lady Bracknell I could ever imagine but, in a radio production, she had an aquiline profile and oozed hauteur from every pore.

Miriam Margolyes is anybody and everybody, from small girls to elderly women and always looks the part, even though I know she is a large lady of, I think, about my own age.

Radio reads to us, too. Bedtime stories, coffee break stories, serials, though sadly no longer those wonderful just-after-breakfast serials which used to replace Yesterday in Parliament in the long recesses. It always took me a day or so to get out of the habit of diving for the off switch at 8.45.

Like most people in the media, even this humble corner of them, I start my day with Today. I am very forthright with cabinet ministers, their shadows, spokesmen of all flavours, John Humphrys, James Naughtie and Sue MacGregor - and would probably tick off Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh, too, if he was involved. Me and half the nation. If only they listened to us.

Come Saturday mornings, I'm an "avid", as Brian Matthew calls listeners to his Sounds of the Sixties as we re-live the music of our mildly mis-spent youth.

I get totally lost in The Moral Maze and en route to Mornington Crescent. I'm advised by You and Yours and Moneybox, have my ignorance plumbed in Brain of Britain and am fascinated by those 15-minute documentaries on odd corners of life which pop up here and there.

And all the while I'm also doing something else - ironing, baking, dusting, cleaning the bath - accompanied by my much-dropped, much-abused transistor with its bent, no longer smoothly telescopic, aerial. TV is a non-starter; it has to be watched.

When I just want to listen, there's music in abundance and variety and I would never forget the World Service, insomniac's friend and fitful dozer's lullaby. Nor would I sail by the shipping forecast, a litany of musical words though, since last week, Finisterre has become the less resonant Fitzroy.

Radio has just one weak spot; comedy. Nowadays it's confined to satire (The News Quiz, The Now Show, The News Huddlines) and the cult I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue. No wonder the Beeb is doing so well with tapes of the old shows. The Goons are immortal and Al Read and Kenneth Horne still bring tears of laughter, and not just to the generation which remembers them.

Mind you, some of us who do remember the Fifties and Sixties wonder how on earth Mr Horne "got away with it" in those pre-smut days. Except of course that, as Max Miller used to say: "It ain't me, lady, it's your mind." In other words, he who laughs last has seen the double meaning. Maybe the BBC executives of the day didn't. Thank goodness for that.

Now I must rush, I've got preparations for Sunday lunch to finish while I listen to The Food Programme.