I WAS arranging an interview with a nice chap the other week and because it was organised through a PR, she asked if she could listen in to our phone conversation to ‘get across’ the interview.

Point number 1(a) – no-one but no-one listens in to my interviews. And point number 1(b) What is this ‘get across’ thing she spoke of?

At the time I’d never heard this expression, probably due to the fact that I don’t get out nearly enough as you wouldn’t if you lived up the back of beyond and can’t drive in the dark.

Anyway, three weeks down the line I am now so aware of what to ‘get across’ means that I think my head will quite probably explode with it all.

Frankly I think most of us are ‘across’ everything that’s going on in this country although our government and the numpties who run national companies and institutions like to think that we aren’t.

We are well aware, thank-you, that someone has allegedly been rigging the gas prices in much the same way the Libor financial rate was apparently fixed and, in my opinion and possibly yours, the petrol and water prices too.

I think we are very much across the Abu Qatada fiasco – we know that the reason we are saddled with this bigoted, foreign, welfare-scrounging terror suspect and his family is because of the legal atmosphere engendered by our disastrous adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Quite possibly we are also across the fact that the reason the Home Secretary won’t use the powers she is said to have to deport this parasite is because she’s a big feartie who is scared of what the Guardian, the BBC and that bird from Liberty will say.

Talking Beeb, I am personally so across everything that’s happened there ever since it was revealed that one Mr J Savile was not, as it ’appens, an eccentric but loveable personality but actually one of Britain’s worst paedophiles ever.

Like most of the people I know, I don’t believe that what appears to have taken place on BBC premises is indicative of a corporation that is crashing down like the Twin Towers but, rather, an issue of judgement and child protection which we’d like to see addressed to ensure that kind of carry-on isn’t happening now.

Unlike its over-excited reporters, who paint a picture of the corporation going Cranford – flapping around and metaphorically throwing its petticoats over its head – no one who is sane believes the BBC is ‘under attack’ or should be stripped of its charter. They just want to know how Savile was able to molest children, if anyone knew he was doing this and if they did know, why wasn’t something done about it at the time. That’s all.

I don’t think anyone in the UK really believes that the reason the original Newsnight investigation into Savile was pulled was because there wasn’t enough evidence for the abuse that took place, they suspect it was done to suit the Christmas schedules and that everything that happened since was people trying to cover posterior.

But in thinking this they don’t see what happened as a slur upon David Attenborough, Terry Wogan and Pudsey Bear and all the other things the corporation does so well.

Other things I am well across are Nadine Dorries in I’m A Celebrity – whatever she may waffle on about connecting with the voters, I am convinced she did it for the money and with an eye to life after losing her seat. Which hopefully she will.

I’m also ‘across’ MP Dennis ‘MacShame’ MacShane’s claims that the reason he fiddled his expenses was because of the pressure he felt after the death of his daughter and his former wife: I think he was just being greedy.

Most of us are substantially ‘across’ the fiction that ‘we are all in it together’; we know that there’s one rule for George Osborne and Starbucks and another rule for the rest of us and wish they’d just admit it.

In fact, the only thing that I don’t feel I am across at all is why the people who run this country and the institutions within it persist in their insane belief that we don’t understand anything and, worse still, believe every ridiculous, pitiable word they day.

We don’t. Hope the message has come ‘across’.

And, before I go off for a lie-down in a darkened room, I’d just like to apologise to the journalist Justine Picardie, whose name I accidentally substituted in last week’s column when writing about her late sister, Ruth. Justine is very much with us and apologies again for the mistake.