Anyway, that’s a bit serious, so I’m going to put off talking about it until I’ve wittered about the radio programme itself, which was Radio 1’s Newsbeat. As a man mere weeks away from his 30th birthday, there’s a line of argument which suggests I ought to have upgraded my choice of station to a proper one, but there’s something about driving home in the dark from a day at the coalface of print news that makes me want to switch my head off and immerse it in something warm, gurgly and stupid. So Radio 1 it is.

Newsbeat, which pops on at 5.45pm, does the strange job of piping the day’s important events into the ears of a demographic which is largely assumed to be young and disinterested. So it tempers the dullness of UN resolutions with “your texts” and humanises its reports on the recession with sound bites from Gary the greengrocer, whose bananas are still flying off the shelves despite the downturn.

The problem is that nobody switches on Radio 1 to listen to the news, so the broadcast tries to render serious news palatable to something with the attention span of a fish, in the hope of hitting the lowest common denominator.

It could be worse. It could be Newsround, the short Children’s BBC show tasked with converting world happenings into something a child cares about – highlights have included a note on the bottom of the screen reading: “Nuclear bombs are bad”.

I hated Newsround when I was growing up. It felt like an affront, a horrifically boring ten-minute chunk of almost-school invading my hard-earned leisure time like a two dimensional tank made of facts. But I understand why it exists.

So, Newsbeat’s story on online bullying had managed to flick on some dim light in my all but atrophied late afternoon brain. It was a “special investigation, ” which, in Newsbeat terms, means “we’ve interviewed more than two people”, and it made me feel quite relieved that computers didn’t force their way into the mainstream until I had left school.

I still remember the room full of BBC Micros that Year 7 pupils were introduced to, so they could learn vital technological skills like making text change colour - skills which were then entirely abandoned between Years 8 and 11, until Computer Science was introduced as an A-level.

I tried that for two months. It was worse than watching paint dry. It was like watching beige paint dry, on the most boring wall of North Yorkshire County Council’s accounts office, while listening to the Lighthouse Family sing excerpts from the 1992 edition of Safety in the Installation and Use of Gas Systems and Appliances. Which, incidentally, is how I spend my Sundays.

Now that the internet – mankind’s greatest communications tool since the invention of the mouth – is everywhere, it’s inevitably going to be used for the whole spectrum of human interactions. Obviously bullying’s on there. The only thing separating a schoolchild’s capacity for cruelty from that of a fascist dictator is political office and a decent army.

I say that out of experience, not spite. Even I, as a swotty, eight-year-old vegetarian, had a heart dark enough to fill a plastic box with different types of insect in the hope they would fight each other to the death.

Disappointingly, they all just tried to get out, but it could have been a bloodbath.

I also once hit a bumblebee with a tennis racquet to see what would happen. It dropped onto a bush and stopped moving, so I ran inside, fraught with guilt, to tell my mum.

“There’s an ill bee on a bush, can you make it better?” I exclaimed. There was no need - it had flown off by the time we returned to the scene of the crime. Even so, I still have nightmares about the evil forces that lurked within me that day.

Imagine if I’d had a mobile phone and the internet. The Tupperware battle royal would be on Youtube.

The bee attack would be a video in the happy slapping folder on my phone. Friends would goad me on via Facebook and create an accompanying Flickr group for photos of craneflies with their legs pulled off.

By the time I was 14 I’d effectively be the vanguard of an insect apocalypse, all documented on the web. I’d probably wind up on Newsround, under the headline: “Killing insects is bad”.

Bring back the BBC Micro, that’s what I say.

There’s only so much evil you can do by changing some text to green.