In small doses, this grandiloquence had its charm. Journalist Kate Mossman remembered Paul O’Neill, the founder of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, desperately trying to impress her with his autodidactic brilliance. “Are you happy?” she asked. “As Solon said to Croesus, ‘Don’t judge your life a success or a failure until the very end.’” Are you worried about the record industry? “I’m sure [George] Washington and Alexander Hamilton worried about the future, too.”

Punt made an excellent ferryman, taking us sleekly from clip to clip with affectionate commentary that both camped up the pop stars’ silliness and reminded us that, once, they had been normal people. Some still were, if you probed a bit. Take Dani Filth from Cradle of Filth who when asked “How Satanic are you?” replied, with lovely nasal pedantry, “I’m a Luciferian. I think it’s a bit more traditional.” Does he feel under pressure to be evil? “No! In my opinion, I’m a good guy. And if it came down to ‘Are you going to join Satan’s kingdom on earth or protect your family?’ Nobody wants a world that’s ruined by torment or horror.”

Voices of a more no-nonsense upbeatness were to be found in Still Here: A Polish Odyssey (Radio 4, Monday). These were the Poles who in 1941 struggled south from Siberian labour camps for the rumoured muster of a Polish army, hungry beyond the imagination of any listener used to mere peckishness. One child, Cheska, was “a skeleton”; but her sister was an “extra skeleton”, so a passing Russian doctor chucked her sugar lumps. “I was so jealous,” recalled Cheska. “I dreamed about being ill so I would get this sugar.”

The British boated them across the Caspian to Iran, then sent the non-combatants on to India and Africa. What made it jump into life was the child’s-eye lens, as the Poles recalled their youthful peepings into Indian abattoirs or their bow-and-arrow hunts by Lake Victoria.

After the war, these 120,000 Poles came on steamers to Britain to settle, their bit of Poland having vanished into Ukraine and Belarus. “We all had malaria,” said Cheska. “We were given tiny yellow tablets, but it made you completely yellow! So this yellow people arrived.” And on the gangway at Southampton, after journeying more miles than perhaps anyone else in the war, they whispered, “England, England, England,” which was a gooseflesh moment like Xenophon’s soldiers after their epic march crying “The sea, the sea.”