My somewhat intemperately phrased criticism of the Daily Telegraph radio listings last summer was quickly followed by a good-natured email from the great Gillian Reynolds, the newspaper’s widely admired radio critic.

She told me: “I’ll happily forward your comments about them being ‘crap’ to the current editor, TV & radio listings.”

Actually, she told me a good deal more, telling me a story that went back to her earliest days on the newspaper.

“When I joined the Daily Telegraph in 1975,” she wrote, “the editor, Bill Deedes, took great pride in pointing out to me that our radio listings, unlike anyone else’s, are in the same type size as the body of the daily paper. ‘That’s because our readers value them, read them,’ he said. Since then the paper has had at least eight editors but the size of print on the radio listings stays the same.

Well this, I would suggest, might be the cause of the problem.

I am prompted to return to the matter because of the inadequacy of what was supplied, in one important respect, by the listings on Monday of last week. The period between 7.30pm and 10.45pm was dealt with in exactly three words: “Opera on 3.”

So what was the opera? Where was it being broadcast from? Who sang?

All this information – indeed, even more – was carried that day in The Times, in a listing extending to 101 words. The length was deserved, for this Opera on 3 was an important cultural event, The Royal Opera’s production of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, starring Bryn Terfel, which I was lucky enough to see at Covent Garden.

The listing was in a smaller type than is used elsewhere in the paper, but perfectly legible. Time, I think, for the Telegraph to review its policy.