It was, the Radio 4 announcer told us, "an extraordinary radio event". For the first time on British radio, an unabridged novel was to be read from beginning to end. Boxing Day and all the network's traditional programmes were swept on to long wave to clear the schedules for eight hours and 20 minutes of Quidditch, broomsticks and some very wizard wizardry. Yesterday was renamed Harry Potter Day.
Broadcasting Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone in its entirety did at least give anti-climactic Boxing Day a new lease of life with Stephen Fry's hugely engaging reading of JK Rowling's first Potter tale on in the background. Atmospheric, funny, and richly evocative, Fry's version will be hard to better.
There's no doubt that to broadcast the novel is A Good Thing, as part of Radio 4 controller, Helen Boaden's aim to attract younger listeners to speech radio. She has a dream of twentysomethings of the future looking back fondly to Boxing Day 2000, when they listened to the radio.
But to simply play tapes that are already commer cially available - the only difference being that you don't get Fry telling you when to turn the tapes over - and to do so in an extravagant half-day wodge, with a repeated Rowling Desert Island Discs for dessert, doesn't make a "radio event".
As a means of encouraging children to tune in, a daily dose of Potter over several weeks, with child-friendly programming on either side of each broadcast, would surely have been more effective. But that wasn't Rowling's wish. In its entirety or not at all was the deal on offer.
The station did its best to break the day up into manageable segments, though. But eight and a half hours was too long to sit still. My guinea pigs - children of nine and 11 - loved the idea, started enthusiastically but were fidgety after an hour, and suggested (illegal) taping as they zoomed off on their shiny new bikes.
I don't think television would try such a venture for a young audience and it hardly has the image problem speech radio has with many youngsters.
In the end, the day was still something of a let-down. What we heard was undoubtedly a great reading of a book that we are potty about, but presented in a way that ensured very few children will have listened to the whole thing.
Those twentysomethings of the future that Boaden dreams of, might be meeting up to reminisce about the time they gave up on Potter day and played with their new toys instead.
