In the late 1970s, as producer of an April Fools' Day edition of the BBC World Service magazine programme Outlook, I was keen to introduce something suitably daft. Among the suggestions I received was one from the BBC's Paris correspondent, who came up with a brilliant "exclusive" on the imminent restoration of the French monarchy, and one from Patrick Moore, who immediately suggested "visual radio".
Word came down from above that I could only use one of these suggestions but the decision was taken out of my hands when I learned that Patrick was already on his way up to London from Selsey, West Sussex.
Visual radio or, as he called it, radiovision, was explained by an enthusiastically earnest Patrick on the air that afternoon as a ground-breaking experimental system whereby listeners round the world could look at their radios and see the speaker talking to them. It was pictorial radio – no cathode ray tubes or screens, definitely not television. To get the best picture, he exhorted his listeners to either crouch down or lie on the floor and look up.
Patrick, who had quite obviously enjoyed his little hoax, later dismissed complaints from people saying they couldn't see anything. They were looking, he suggested, from the wrong angle.