Those who awake at 8am on a bank holiday morning of a festival are usually pill-perspiring goons whose eyes appear to have melted into a similar murky bog to that they are walking in. The kind of people that aged hereditary peers believe to be created as result of buggery. At Hay, of course, they are alert, considerate types that look like they have already done their morning exercises and written their requisite 500 words of the next novel. We sat in the on-site cafe from which the Today programme was enlisting the help of Hay visitors to put together the morning's show. James Naughtie welcomes everyone by declaring how, despite what his producers insist, he certainly has no doubt that all will end in tears.

We are told to split into groups of six from which we shall have a Today programme expert take us through the editing programme and we will all put together our perfect show for the morning. I am 10 and it's the school trip to Granada Studios Tour all over again. Except now Eric Hobsbawm is next door rather than Jack Duckworth. We get a producer named Peter who listens patiently as middle-aged women tell him that they would prefer more interviews with real doctors for the 8:05 interview rather than Patrica Hewitt. He seems genuinely excited when a woman suggests they should regularly interview schoolteachers from state schools. We have been handed a list of the day's events that Today would like to cover and Peter asks which story the teacher could discuss. "Well, I don't know. But it'd be good to have them on, wouldn't it?" Peter nods with less certainty.

One chap is much younger than the rest and makes a comment roughly every five seconds. He makes unsubtly wry references to Andrew Gilligan, tuts at the chat show suggestions of other members of the group, and insists it is the BBC's duty to cover Hugo Chavez's latest act of censorship over any nonsense about the NHS. Eventually Peter hands him a business card so he can stop the job application and we can all get some peace and quiet. An older gentleman suggests some of the books Gordon Brown should take on his holiday.

I suddenly realise that this, essentially a bit of fun at Hay where people fiddle with an irrelevant Bank Holiday edition of the Today programme, is the Britain that Gordon Brown was threatening to bring about yesterday. A Britain where we are all the experts, supposed to solve the country's environmental and security problems. The supposed intellectual, celebrity-hating, new prime minister wants to turn Britain into the land of the inexpert where planes are handed over for us to fly ourselves (having offset our own carbon emissions) and school is just a matter of locking children in a library for 15 years. Thanks heavens it could never happen, any more than tomorrow morning's Today programme will follow my advice to get Shane McGowan in to talk about alcohol warning stickers.

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