FREDDIE Mercury was right - and to understand just how right he was, I'd like you to consider what makes us feel old.

Well, it's not your grey hair, nor the fact that you still find the now 59-year-old Lulu attractive, nor even that you wish they wouldn't broadcast those damned adverts so LOUD that dates you.

And it's not a tendency to call the radio 'the wireless', either - although now you're on the right lines.

I was literally at my mother's knee when I realised that, above all else, you were past it, in the past, when you developed a liking for Radio 2.

Here was a station that had obviously been invented for the sole benefit of my mother.

Her heroes were Jimmy Young and Pete Murray because they played Jim Reeves, Mantovani and Frankie Vaughn, and I was sure that when I also liked the kind of things they liked on Radio 2, I could officially consider myself old.

Be careful, though, because getting old enough for Radio 2 has never been the same as getting too old for Radio 1.

I did that when I was 13 and couldn't work out the point of switching on, just so I could listen to somebody else's bad taste in gormless disco music.

Mind you, disco seems positively cerebral when compared with the rap they play on Radio 1 these days.

But any tendency I might have had towards listening to the wireless was so completely exorcised by the sorry state of it in the mid-1970s that - even mostly passed up the chance to join the revolution John Peel had instigated.

But after hardly ever turning the radio on for 30 years, I now grudgingly have to admit that things have come full circle.

Far from Radio 2 being a gauge of how old you are, you could even say that a liking for it is now an indication that you're young at heart. That's partly due to the fact that the music the station is now playing is cooler than ever - despite what my son says - and that's because the best stuff that John Peel used to play is now at the core of it.

It's also because the crumbly old DJs Radio 2 used to wheel out have been replaced by quick-witted people who appeal to mature and discerning listeners like us, and it hasn't sold out to dumbing down, like its televisual counterparts.

I give you Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie and especially the razor-sharp Chris Evans as evidence.

So, when you also take account of the way national radio has embraced the internet, the words of Freddie Mercury are ringing truer than ever.

I may have scoffed at them in 1984 when I first heard Radio Ga Ga and he said of radio: "You had your time, you had your power, you've yet to have your finest hour."

But Freddie, you were definitely on to something.

2:09pm Thursday 3rd April 2008

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