Time for a brief moan. It seems to me that in the last few weeks of fiction on Radio 4 I've been inundated with examples of explanatory dialogue being unrealistically interrupted. The scenario is usually that a character is trying to explain his actions or some event to another; within one or two sentences the explanation is interrupted with something like 'I don't understand what you're trying to say...' or 'You're not making any sense...'. Maybe it's just me but when I or any of the people I regularly talk to explain something, the audience usually waits until there's an obvious pause in the explanation - they don't interrupt before there's been a chance to say anything!

It's a trivial matter I suppose but it's one of those things that once you think about it, it seems to happen all the time! Is it merely to give listeners an indication that the other person is listening? Most of the examples I heard last week seemed to make the opening part of the explanation unduly obscure to invite the comment, after which the remaining dialogue was clear and uninterrupted.

J