£50 for a car stereo? Not if the car costs £100, I'm afraid

MUSICAL maestro Thomas Beecham reckoned you should try everything once except incest and folk dancing, but I'd like to add a motoring mishap to his list.

I reckon I'm fairly open to pretty much anything on four wheels, no matter how suspect the pink alloys on the Citroen C2 always parked at the end of my street seem. The classical composer's mantra, brought kicking and screaming into 2010, really ought to read: try everything once except incest, folk dancing, and buying any car stereo that's worth more than the car itself.

As a principle it means I'm loudly singing out of tune to the Max Power generation, but I'm from a world where I'd rather have Pininfarina than Pioneer painted proudly on my car, and reckon the rule applies neatly to any set of wheels, no matter how cheap, cheerful, chintzy or full of subwoofers it is. A Bang and Olufsen system is fine for an Aston Vantage because it costs a fraction of the car's price, but sticking one into a secondhand Saxo is seriously sad.

The only problem is that - like all rules - I'm running the risk of breaking it, because The £100 Car has a truly shocking stereo, being one of those tape/radio jobs from twenty years ago which only seems to pick up stations I hate listening to. It's fine to fit an MP3 system to the Mini because the car's worth enough, but even the cheapest CD player I can find for the ancient Renault 5 costs more than half the car itself.

I could do absolutely nothing and carry on listening to the radio, but it only picks up that frequency you normally find in minicabs at 2am and it's not driving music, but music to drive you mad. All I wanted was to listen to Texas on the way into work!

In the end I strayed into Currys and bought a batch of cassette tapes to end my misery, but even there the staff gave me a bemused look, as if I'd wandered in from the 1990s via an MC Hammer video in an embarrassed attempt to track down some ye olde technology. Just to rub it in the car depicted on the side of the tapes is a Jaguar XJ220, which would have been on your bedroom wall, circa 1992.

I'm getting desperate, but I can't break the car stereo taboo. If I do, I'd be forced to consider incest and folk dancing as well.