Jon Faine, she suggests, has become suspiciously fluffy recently, to the extent that last week he unleashed his investigative skills on council policies on the length of dog leads. (Bleeding Edge possibly shouldn't admit this, but we probably would have been quite interested in learning about dog lead regulations.)

Had Gay listened this afternoon, she probably would have been beside herself. Stubbsy was at it again, getting callers to ring up and chat about the pet names people deployed with their loved ones.

Let's see now: one chap complained that his wife used the same four terms in a completely undiscriminatory fashion (about which Stubbsy observed that terms like "love" and "darl" were "default settings", which we thought was quite a clever line), a young woman revealed that although she loved the name "Chief" which her boyfriend gave her, she was no longer playing cowboys and indians with him, and a Welsh chap explained that the fact that he was called "Johnny Grownomore" was a practical necessity, given that (a) his family were height-challenged, and (b) the fact that every second Welshman is called Jones, or Williams, means they have to have some way, aside from surnames and Christian names, of identifying themselves.

What's fascinating to Bleeding Edge is that the people who call in clearly can't regard this stuff as . For all we know, it's the . And given that they're paying their few cents a day to run the ABC, just like everybody else, shouldn't they be entitled to have their dull and frivolous needs met?

After all, isn't the current ABC promotional line something like "Everyone's ABC"?

The fact is, of course, the ABC has never been everyone's ABC. It's been the exclusive preserve of the more patrician levels of our society. Ironically, an awful lot of Liberal voters wouldn't listen to anything else.

And if there has been a dumbing down of ABC content, it's not been confined to local radio. How did the householders of Toorak and Brighton react, we wonder, to the fact that the ABC TV news recently led its nightly bulletin on the Kylie Minogue breast cancer story?

Perhaps our brain has become addled by the occasional exposure to this sort of stuff, but we're starting to speculate on the possibility that the appearance of Richard Stubbs is in fact part of some devious plot to piss Liberal voters off to the point where they start to demand that the Treasurer and Prime Minister do something to address the decline in ABC funding. Stubbs is probably in on the conspiracy.