Calling heroes everywhere, let's save Jimmy Young: To some, Jimmy Young is a doddering, aged DJ, who is past his sell-by date. To others, he is the last bastion of maledom left in a female-dominated world.

Whenever the Daily Mail sounds the bugle, I am the first to step into line and march behind whatever banner has been hoist. I am a veteran of the Save the Sixpence campaign, which achieved a short-lived victory. I was in the heat of the battle to Save our Red Telephone Boxes -- monuments to the partial success of which are still to be found here and there, clothed in the evocative smell of tramps' urine. And I rushed to enlist in the war to Save the Pashmina, though I cannot recall the outcome.

So it will come as no surprise that when the Daily Mail once again sounded the call to arms, I awoke with a start, hastened to the broom cupboard to fetch my pitchfork and colander, and set about stiffening the sinews and summoning up the rhesus negative. There is nothing, not even Lynda Lee-Porter, to compare with a good fight: to march to the beat of the drum, to sight the enemy hordes, to engage in hand-to-hand combat -- it's the very stuff of life.

Ours, of course, is not to reason why. With God and the Daily Mail on our side, our cause must be just, our victory assured: that is all we need to know. Just for the record, however, this time we take up arms to Save Jimmy Young, under threat from the "blockheads of the BBC".

Jimmy Young has been in British hands for 80 years. Thanks to loving restoration -- the original hair and teeth went missing years ago -- he is still in good working order, all things considered, and functions perfectly well for part of each week day. Age cannot wither him nor custom stale the infinite variety of his two catchphrases, "orft we jolly well" and "sewer the telephone". Yet the BBC wants to replace him with a cheapjack, plastic imitation, whose provenance is uncertain, but is believed to be Scottish.

It would be a scandal if Jimmy Young were to go the same way as so many of our former national treasures and be lost to the nation. I am not being small minded or a Little Englander; of course visitors to the Guggenheim or the Gerry would enjoy casting their eyes on this rough-hewn fragment of British heritage. But that is precisely my point: Jimmy Young was made in England and it would be a crime to lose such an important artifact. And so it is that we cavaliers take up arms against the blockheads.

Yet, as is so often the case in times of conflict, the cause of the war masks a greater significance. However one judges the merits of the casus belli -- and opinions vary -- Jimmy Young is a man, and as such, he is a member of a threatened species. It is no exaggeration to say that his saving would be ...