WASHED AND READY TO EAT

If you have a taste for the oddball, I hope you'll enjoy my survey of some of the weirdest news stories of 2012 . I've put together three short audio files which talk you through everything from Silvio Berlusconi's chat with Hosni Mubarak about Ruby the Heart Stealer through to the German visitors to Yorkshire who encountered people dressed as SS officers. Enjoy!

"I'm with the Coroner's office..." The Big Q always stood up for the little guy. ‘Gentlemen, you are about to enter the most fascinating sphere of police work: the world of forensic medicine.’ As hardened LA cops tumbled to the floor, we knew we were about to launch into another episode of the cult TV show Quincy ME , in which actor Jack Klugman played a coroner whose inquisitive nature and burning sense of injustice consistently got him into trouble with his boss. One of the sure signs of middle age is finding that people immortalised in obituaries tend to be familiar figures from your childhood or teenage years. Learning about the 90-year-old Klugman’s death over Christmas made me feel genuinely sad. It also made me ponder a very important question: who the hell would perform the autopsy? Would it be Sam, Quince’s worthy, but rather plodtastic assistant? Or Aston, the smooth-talking bureaucrat whose career had taken him from the mortuary table to the boardro...

I can't help but notice that the biggest advertisers in The Richmond Magazine - a glossy freebie distributed to households in the prosperous London suburb - seem to be private schools, lingerie shops and divorce lawyers. I'll lead you to draw your own conclusions as to what this tells us about the lives of the readers.