Radio review: The Wireless World of Gerry Wells

The Wireless World of Gerry Wells (BBC World Service, Friday) was a terrific portrait of an eccentric. It was also a love letter to radio: Gerry Wells, as presenter Dan Shepherd noted, "has spent his life mending wireless sets". His south London home is a museum holding more than 1,200 old radios, all proudly displayed. "Apart from a hundred maturing in black bin bags in the loft," Wells said. Now in his 80s, Wells runs workshops teaching others to fix their old sets. He shuns new technology, especially digital radio. "The sound is thin, weak and anaemic," he complained. He is even less keen on television, and the idea of retiring: "What would I do? Sit down and watch TV? Not bloody likely." This feature told his life story engagingly – Wells got into trouble as a teenager obsessed with all things electrical, stealing from bomb-hit houses in the war – and hovered over the significant oddness of the way Wells lives. I loved the bit where an equally peculiar couple wandered in: a bee-keeper and paper restorer, looking for someone to fix their television. Most of all, though, this captured a sense of a life from another era, and one lived intensely in a radio-filled nook. As Wells said of his home, "Born in this room, conceived in that one."