Had Radio 4 mutated into Radio 3? Had Radio 3, in a fit of expansionist pique, colonised Radio 4? Hearing Glazunov and Mozart emitting from where there should have been stories about Railtrack, Kosovo and human interest padding was a curiously disconcerting experience. It usually only happens when there's a national disaster.

BBC1's Breakfast News was forced to rely on the BBC's 24-hour news network and an old edition of Call My Bluff (was this a management message to the unions?), but its half-hour One O'Clock News went ahead as usual.

Radio 5 Live wasn't: in place of its morning phone-in it recycled an `in-depth' interview with Glenn Hoddle, and `the best of' Nicky Campbell shows (there's nought so stale as an old phone-in).

AmongCampbell's guests was a faith healer who talked about miracles and dark forces. One wondered just how prescient she was, and whether she was talking of staff or management.

Woman's Hour replaced its normal live edition with a pre-recorded one on Queen Victoria. It opened with the words ``It was a never-to-be forgotten day''. That was going a bit far, but certainly BBC staff succeeded in alerting people to their grievances, even if the early, truncated news bulletins included only perfunctory reports about the strike.

By the afternoon, the bulletins had begun to mention some of the reasons behind it.

On Radio 4 at lunchtime, the World wasn't At One but at sixes and sevens, relaying instead part of an old Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert, though BBC management must have counted it a success that they didn't have to fall back on John Birt reading the news.

This week's episode of the drama series In the Red on BBC2 had a BBC personnel officer promoted to producer of a peaktime televisionprogramme. What had looked on Tuesday like an absurdly fanciful satire had turned, by Thursday, into social realism.

Though at first the changes made radio and TV seem pleasantly unfamiliar, soon they began to sound like Radio 5 Live during a wet Wimbledon, when you're certain that another re-run of Borg v McEnroe will give you an embolism.

There was one infallible sign of a world unchanged. On Radio 4 Long Wave and BBC1, as if they were blissfully unaware of conflicts and crises, there was cricket.