This week's studio humdinger

There's been heaps of recording work recently (a regular seasonal blitz of preparation materials for the national College Entrance Examinations - gaokao - at the beginning of next month), and it has, of course, thrown up dozens of inadvertently humorous moments. Gawd, it's been gruelling, though; I'm mighty glad the big rush is nearly over now. The work has been made even harder of late by a common formatting glitch where punctuation (commas and apostrophes particularly) will be omitted and massive spaces in the text inserted in their stead. You know the kind of thing: it happens quite commonly when you cut & paste from 'Word' into another medium (such as 'Blogger'!); but somehow this is much, much worse. It really makes it very hard to sight-read when there are random spaces in the text between key words or in the middle of words.

And it can occasionally lead to hilarious oddities such as this:

"I regret for Michael Jordan sex service."

Well, what it actually said was.....

"I regret for Michael Jordan s ex-service." Two Chinese basketball fans were talking about their love of the NBA, you see; and they were attempting to say they were sorry that Jordan had retired. It took me a moment or two to work it out. At first I thought they had mixed him up with Kobe Bryant!

A close second (though a rather too painfully uncomfortable one) was this, from a presentation extolling the appeal of the UK's University of Bradford to international students:

"The University has attracted students from all over the world, many of whom have stayed on to form resident communities in the city."

Nothing wrong with that, you may say? Indeed not - but I performed a lightning edit on it, excising a single offensive word from the middle of it. Yes, the original script had said 'too many'!