THE big revelation this Easter season came from The Food Programme (Radio 4, Easter Day): eating less helps you lose weight. You heard it there first. Specifically, fasting for two days of the week helps you to lose weight. It also makes you look younger, increases your mental acuity, and gives you a general sense of spiritual well-being.

When The Food Programme was not plugging the Fast Diet (the most popular and cultish regime since the Atkins Diet), it was making a half-decent point about fasting as a religious process. We met a charming Pentecostalist pastor who said that fasting enabled us "to become acquainted with God's glory and knowledge". A neuroscientist told us what the biochemical basis for this might be: when you were hungry, nerve cells were more active, and more synapses were created.

The presenter, Sheila Dillon, fasted so that we did not have to - starving herself for 30 hours, which is 30 years shorter than your average medieval hermit. She reported that she felt alert, energised, and messianic in her enthusiasm for the new regime. There is no medical evidence to support any of these claims, but there are plenty of publishers out there prepared to relieve you of something pounds ninety-nine pence for the benefit of their ancient wisdom.

The truth that lay at the heart of Out of the Ordinary (Radio 4, Easter Monday) is similarly commonplace: that we all hear what we want to hear - although its discovery was a good deal more entertaining. Jolyon Jenkins's documentary explored Electronic Voice Projection (EVP). This is the technique used by many spiritualists and researchers into paranormal activity: it involves recording electrostatic noise and listening to it for messages from beyond the grave.

The practice was developed by a Latvian, Dr Konstantin Raudive, and we heard some recordings of his work, containing snippets of speech from Hitler - curiously, speaking in Latvian, a language he is not known to have spoken - making such ludic pronouncements as "You are a girl here or you are thrown out."

What is at work here is a psychological chimera that has been the focus of study for some years. With prompting, we can hear words and phrases emerging from the impenetrable aural chaos; and one recent experiment has shown how prompted listeners claim to hear strains of Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" when all they are hearing is white noise.

I do hope that nobody will hold it against the Revd Lucy Winkett that she suffered such a hagiographic mauling at the hands of Profile (Radio 4, Holy Saturday). She started off in Mary Ann Sieghart's piece as a possible first female bishop, and, by the end, was being touted as the first female archbishop.

I count myself among Ms Winkett's admirers, but Sieghart's disingenuous attempt to find a blemish by asking her witnesses "Does she have any flaws?" makes a nonsense of the process. Ms Winkett has had to endure much already; and, if she is to achieve all that is wished on her, she will, one suspects, have to endure much more.