An intriguing e-mail arrived recently from Anna Golding, who lives in Banstead in Surrey. She is clearly both an avid reader of The Week - a weekly news digest magazine much praised by Britain's intelligentsia and chatterati - and an alert listener to Radio 2 on Saturday mornings.
"Jonathan Ross lifts his 'funny stories I read in the paper' section of his show entirely from the regular 'funny stories' article in The Week," she writes. "I am not amused.
"I first noticed it some weeks ago, when he used all three 'amusing' stories from The Week, and I was quite amazed. I thought, how lazy is that? Last Saturday, he was at it again. He chose two of the three stories during the time I was listening. He doesn't mention The Week when he does it."
Could this be, well, just a remarkable coincidence? After all, Ross does tell us when introducing these items, which invariably provoke much chortling from his sidekick, Andy Davies: "Here's a funny story I wed in one of the papers." Surely he would not knowingly mislead the BBC audience - to which, of course, he so abjectly apologised after that lapse of judgment with Russell Brand a year ago that led to his three-month suspension?
The correlation is undeniably striking. The week after Golding's e-mail, The Week, in its regular "It Must Be True . . . I Read It in the Tabloids" column (usually on page 14, for those keen to study it), printed stories about a Los Angeles man who had died on his balcony, but whose corpse had not been removed because the locals thought it was part of a Hallowe'en display, and a dwarf-throwing contest in Australia called the Midget Cup, which has upset some of Australia's shorter citizens. Both of these Ross did on his show - and in the order in which they appeared on the page.
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The Saturday after that, which was Hallowe'en, the "It Must Be True. . ." column in The Week carried four funnies. As usual, they occupied a paragraph each. In descending order, these were: the New Zealand town that has cancelled its dead-rabbit- throwing contest following protests from animal lovers; the Norwegian customs officers who arrested a man with 14 pythons taped to his body; shoppers at the Glasgow branch of Ikea who claim to see Christ's image in the wood grain of a lavatory door; and the Polish postman who took so long to deliver his letters that some of the recipients had died by the time they arrived. Ross did four funny stories a few days later on his show. They were exactly the same. They even went out in the same order. Amazing!
These words are being written on a Tuesday. The Week comes out at the earliest on a Wednesday and more usually on Thursday or Friday. Ross's show, which used to be live, is now recorded on a Friday. So I have no idea what will be in the magazine or on his show. If precedent is anything to go by, however, the funny stories in The Week will also be the funny stories on Ross's radio show a day or two later, introduced by the preamble: "Here's one I wed in the papers."
Let us hope that Golding is wrong, and what she has observed is actually the most protracted and extraordinary coincidence in British media history. Otherwise, we would have to conclude that Britain's highest-earning broadcaster, paid £6m a year of our money, is too indolent or mean even to buy his own newspapers. And what a depressing prospect that would be.