This column does not go in for pretended outrage, so I won’t say more than I was mildly surprised by Brian Matthews’s playing of one particular record in his excellent Radio 2 show Sounds of the Sixties last Saturday.

From the dawning year of the decade, this was Tell Laura I Love Her by the UK one-hit wonder Ricky Valance.

The song describes a young man’s death in a driving accident, which was presumably forgotten by Mr Matthew and his producer Phil ‘The Collector’ Swern.

How else to explain their decision to air it just a week after the death of an 11-year-old Scottish lad, Keir Millar, following just such a crash?

It seems to me a significant error in good taste to expose the boy’s parents and friends to the possibility of hearing a song that had made entertainment (and money) out of tragedy. Some of the lyrics follow: “He drove his car to the racing grounds/He was the youngest driver there/The crowed roared as they started the race/Around the track they drove at a deadly pace/No one knows what happened that day/Or how his car overturned in flames/But as they pulled him from the twisted wreck/With his dying breath, they heard him say:Tell Laura I love her.”

Another possibility, I suppose, is that Messrs Matthew and Swern had not heard of Keir’s death, though this seems unlikely.

Strange lacunae in broadcasters’ knowledge are sometimes revealed, though. Profiling Labour leadership hopeful Yvette Cooper for PM last week, Shaun Ley spoke of her husband Ed Balls’s shock defeat in the General Election as having occurred “in the early hours”.

This frankly is, well, balls. It was at about 8.15am that the Shadow Chancellor’s defeat was announced.