At last, a radio show that allows Clare Balding to show her true worth Billed as a programme that charts how the British have shaped sport and how sport has shaped Britain, it reminds you, gently, of why sport matters. It reminds you of the pockets of small-mindedness, it reminds you of the overpowering desire of the elite to remain the elite, but also of all the reasons why sport is so wonderful - its power to shape minds and bodies for the better, the capacity for self-expression it gave (and gives) the boarding school boys of the south, the working-class men of the north, the soft expanding middle classes. This week's theme is the advent of professionalism and modern spectator sport. So far, we've heard the events leading up to that dramatic evening at the George Hotel in Huddersfield in 1895, which saw the birth of rugby league, and the class war and pettiness from the Rugby Football Union that followed, and the hidden social mores behind suburban pursuits of tennis and golf. For Radio 4, the series is a bold move. Sport is usually confined to the news bulletins, Test Match Special on long wave and that slightly strange spoof sports comedy show with Garry Richardson. If you want sport, you listen to 5 Live. But the gamble has paid off both for the series itself and as wonderful pre-Olympic PR for those who perhaps don't like sport very much and are put off by too much shouting. It is a triumph too for Balding who has, without fanfare and with a winning way with a fleece, become pretty much the leading sports presenter in the country. She is from an upper-crust enough background to have come downstairs as a girl and found the Queen in the sitting room asking about horses, but her appeal is universal. She fronts the BBC's racing coverage, the Olympics and Paralympics, the Winter Olympics, rugby league's Challenge Cup final and became the first British woman to commentate on a Wimbledon final on Radio 5 last year. Though in a different mould to Des Lynam, and perhaps without his twinkling eye, she has a similar way with the camera and microphone: laid-back, funny, nice and knowledgeable without the need to thrust that knowledge in the audience's face. She is not the first major female sports presenter - Sue Barker and Gabby Logan got there first - but she has gone a step further. That she has managed to become the BBC's face of sport, almost without comment, speaks of a social change quite profound enough to be mentioned in her radio programme. As Balding has said, women's sport is 900 years behind men's and at the turn of the 20th century a woman who wanted to do anything active had to tussle with a corset and a hat. A hundred years on, a woman is presenting the most gripping and entertaining sports programme around. Don't miss today's episode: Fighting Back - the relationship between boxing and Britain's ethnic minorities.