The Canadian political analyst and popular music expert Mark Steyn has spent about a year transforming his blog into a TV station, so that he can now interview someone he admires right there in vision. Apart from his habit of punctuating any long sentence with the word “ah” (imagine Sue Barker as a baritone), Steyn is, ah, an ideal broadcaster; provided, that is, that, ah, you have an extra half-hour in your day to follow him through the occasional flat spots in his, ah, doomed search for perfect fluency.

How Steyn finds the time to do what he does is one of the mysteries in this new era of personalised broadcasting. He can write, speak and sing, and, being a Canuck, he can probably also skate. His problem now is going to be finding a weekly guest as bright as he is. One of the first shows to be globally transmitted through his new enhanced medium was an interview with Sir Tim Rice. I watched it with fascination, awed all over again by how scruplously Rice attends to the language in which he expresses himself. I don’t think he said “ah” once, and unless he were quoting the lyrics of Ah, Sweet Mystery Of Life verbatim, I think he would never do so.

But what made the interview a benchmark was that it was so confidently technical. Both host and guest, for example, found convincing reasons to agree that a solid rhyme is inherently more satisfactory than an approximate one. Try getting any two ex-members of the Eagles to agree on that.

As if driven by the urge for verification, I stumbled into the semantic desert where the ex-members of the Eagles had been herded together in order to give us the benefit of their wisdom. As is usual in documentaries about popular music, any actual singing was held to a minimum, so that the singers could speak in prose, which costs a lot less to quote. Alas, this restriction left them exposed as a line-up of relentless bores. When they sang together back in the day, they were magic, but when they talk one at a time now, they are nerve gas: birds fall stunned from trees, and within a few minutes you start reflecting on life’s brevity.

The quickest way back to mental health is to dial up the full seven minutes of their most amazing song, Hotel California. One of the veteran Eagles gave us his explanation of its power: “My single explanation is it’s a song about the journey from innocence to experience.” Imagine being stuck on a bus with him. And they all talk like that. As with any pop group, it isn’t a wonder that they eventually stopped, it’s a wonder that they ever got started.