BY MY reckoning, this is the 1000th piece I have written for the Church Times. I cannot be sure, thanks to a catastrophic meltdown of my hard drive in the early millennium; but it started for me back in the days of cassette tapes and those fax machines with the curly paper. If you wanted to hear Something Understood then you would have be up at crack of dawn on a Sunday morning; and everything would stop for The Archers.

Now the entirety of the radio schedules are laid out for us to sample when we choose; and the producer’s sensitively nuanced attempts to match mood with time-of-day are mangled in an age when you are able to listen to Sunday Worship eating a Friday-night, post-pub kebab in your underpants. The podcast is the ultimate expression of the radio show liberated from time and place, and while some of them offer bogus “bonus material” to podcastees, in other cases the podcast offers admission to a club, a fellowship, a congregation.

It is now time to admit that, while Beyond Belief, Heart and Soul, and Prayer for the Day are all admirable programmes, my own most consistent loyalty as a radio listener has been — for at least the past five years or so — to a different Church. Like the mainstream faiths, this one has a strict set of rules, a language rich in history and self-reference, and a ritualistic canon of versicles and responses.

The Church of which I speak is “the Church of Wittertainment”, aka Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review (Radio 5 Live, Fridays). In any gathering, I could immediately identify the faithful by announcing “Hello to Jason Isaacs!”; and, just as the instinctive response among an Anglican congregation to the words “The Lord be with you” would be “And with thy spirit”, so in the litany of Wittertainment “How do you do Snapchat?” is answered with “You just do Snapchat.”

The success of the show, like the success of any faith group, relies not so much on content as on communion. I am a devotee, despite being at that time in the domestic life-cycle when I and “the good lady wife her indoors” rarely get out to the movies. We are the truly blessed: those who have not seen and yet still believe in Mark Kermode’s opinions, such that we are prepared to quote them as gospel whenever conversation turns to new cinema releases.

Indeed, even when the high-priests spout opinions which are clearly nonsense, we are prepared to keep listening: Johnny Depp’s Transcendence, for instance, will need to wait until the Last Judgement before it is reassessed, and even then it will be consigned to the flames with much other cinematic chaff.

None of this will make any sense unless you count yourself among the saved; but, for the convert, a whole new world of liturgy and ceremony awaits: the Wittertainment cruise, Tromsö sex-parties, flappy hands, and much, much more. And to all of you who read the Church Times radio review and listen to Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review (as rare, no doubt, as lady pipe-smokers), I say a big “Wassup!”