Despite my best efforts, the eleven minute dash on my bike from the studio after last night’s Channel 4 News to London’s Royal Festival Hall, only graced me with the echoes of the last chords of Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto.

To have missed Daniel Barenboim’s exuberant performance so closely, felt like an act of sacrilege.

The programme promised a second half of the concert devoted to Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, Op.31. There was something identified as an “illustrated talk” on the programme, before the performance of the work itself.

Barenboim bounced onto the stage and proceeded to talk his Staatskapelle Orchestra from Berlin into illustrative splashes of the theme as he led us humorously and imaginatively through each of the variations.

I have always found Schoenberg a bit like a dense sea food linguine – a mass of tangled chords leavened with delicious moments of scallop-like highlights. In short, I have never understood a bar of the stuff.

But last night transported in the hands of this amazing man, the scales fell from my ears. First the cellos ground out the four note theme, then the double bases. Somehow there it was, to be retrieved in every variation whatever the cacophony of sound that surrounded it.

Come the performance itself, the packed thousand-strong audience was spellbound, craning to detect the musical path Barenboim had prepared for us.

And there it was, large as life, augmented by what had once sounded like a series of high decibel road accidents, the music finally made sense.

Electrified, the entire audience leapt to its feet at the end in a most un-British standing ovation.

It dawned upon me that Barenboim, whose endless orchestral pursuit of bridge building in the Middle East, manifest in the West East Divan Orchestra of Israeli and Palestinian players, would be a very fit recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s a long time since I last interviewed him, but it seems in the years since I last saw him close up, he has lost none of his energy and commitment. He would leave a few other Nobel recipients in the shade.

By the way here’s an unprecedented cross promotion – you can catch the entire Barenboim four night run of Beethoven’s piano Concerto’s and works by Shoenberg on BBC Radio 3 starting tonight!

Block yer ears. Shut yer eyes. Krishnan and I and our able friend Mara Carlyle, are in preparation for tonight’s Newsroom’s Got Talent competition (no danger of any of us winning – we’re just ensuring that we can actually appear at all at Vinopolis in the Borough Market).

It’s a contest between the BBC, Sky, al-Jazeera, ITV, Channel 4 and Uncle Tom Cobbley, in which every one of us is going to make an idiot of ourselves – wait till you see my wig! All in the cause of Leonard Cheshire Homes and Helen House Hospice.

There will be video of the performance on our website, come Friday. Beyond what you see, we’ll be performing with our band, Fourplay.

The item on the rarest Dinky toy in the world on last night’s Channel 4 News gave me a pang of nostalgia as I glimpsed my beloved Dinky car transporter (not the actual one, but the model) on the right of screen in Nick Glass’s report.

When I was seven years old my mum and dad put me in for a choral scholarship to become a chorister at Winchester Cathedral.

To my total surprise, I got it. I heard the news in the late afternoon of the day I had sung in competition with six other boys. My father, who was a cleric and who believed himself to be a little poorer that he really was, made an unprecedented offer.

“You can have anything you want,” he cried. With ten minutes to closing time, we dashed to the toy shop. And there it was sitting in the window – a pale blue Dinky car transporter.

“That’s what I want,” I whooped. It was a whacking great sixteen shillings. My pocket money was seven old pennies at the time (it went up year on year). My father took a sharp intake of breath and we marched into the closing shop. My apparently overwhelming desire for instant gratification was sated.

But I was taken back to my chorister roots last night after doing the News. For only the second time since my choir-singing days, I found myself singing in public.

I was on the bill at the Green Note in Camden Town. A young friend, Mara Carlisle, who works at the New Horizon Youth Centre (for homeless teenagers) where I am chair, is the most gifted of blues singers.

She has recently had a contract with EMI and is now going solo on her own label. But one of her CDs is to include duets. I and the singer Will Young are to be two of her duettists.

And so it was that I found myself singing with her and her brother, guitarist Bennett, and her spiritual brother Dan on accordion, at 10.45 pm last at the Green Note.

Despite pre-performance nerves, the old voice came back and Somebody Dear went, well, er like a song, to a cheer you could have heard across the street.

I don’t often get to sing on Channel 4 News. But last night, stirred by the appearance of Alvin Stardust on the 50th anniversary of Buddy Holly’s death, I found myself doing just that.

Mr Stardust had a guitar which dated from his own encounter with the bespectacled rock legend. And the rest is replay.