With the fine disregard for cash register appeal which has endeared him to record company executives over the last twenty years, Bryan Ferry decided that 2012 was the perfect year to assemble a group to play old Roxy Music songs in the style of the Duke Ellington band of the 30s. Commercially the record "The Jazz Age" died like a louse in a Russian's beard but among its handful of admirers was Baz Luhrmann, who commissioned Ferry to provide similar music for the soundtrack of his version of The Great Gatsby. All of which leads us to Bryan Ferry's Jazz Age (Monday 4:00pm R4) a programme that explores the pre-rock and roll days when British students in duffel coats gathered in basements to listen to jazz music rooted in the idioms of black America. Ferry, slightly too young to catch this tide at the flood, reminiscences about those years in the foggy tone of a retired spy. More animated is the great Chris Barber, who is still rattling up and down the motorways at the age of 83, and the redoubtable journalist and photographer Val Wilmer, who remembers it as a time when the musicians smelt of sweat and the country felt like a cheese roll that had been left out too long. Somebody give this woman a series.
Every time I pass the Bank of England I find myself wondering what they can possibly keep inside there these days. There's no such uncertainty in the USA. Apparently a significant proportion of the world's gold is still kept Inside The Fed (Tuesday 8:00pm R4). Most of it isn't Uncle Sam's. Following major transactions between nations somebody nips down there and simply moves a few bricks off one pile and puts them on another, which is somehow reassuring. Simon Jack's programme talks to the people who worked there during the post-Lehman days of 2008 when, according to one, "it went from being very stressful to being terrifying at times" and, according to another, "I didn't sleep all night for eighteen months". A longer view of some of the same issues is provided in the Book of the week Matthew Hart's Gold: The Race For The World's Most Seductive Metal (Weekdays 9:45am R4) which covers the whole story from the Inca Gold of the 16th century to the ghost miners of modern South Africa.
A Cause For Caroling (Weekdays 1:45pm R4) is Jeremy Summerly's account of how the music we like to feel is a sacred component of a quintessentially home-grown Christmas is actually a tribute to the British genius for assimilation and straight-faced pretence that anything we happen to like has been going on for for, oh, ages. From this I learned many things, including the fact that the refrain used to be referred to as "the burden". This I feel would have been recognised by Hank Williams, who died in the back of a car sixty years ago this New Year and is remembered in Great Lives (Tuesday 4:40pm R4) with Ricky Ross as the sponsor and Nick Barraclough as the reassuring authority.
There is no better nightcap than Kerry Shale reading Truman Capote short stories in the Book At Bedtime slot (Weekdays 10:45pm R4). These tales, all set in the author's peripatetic Southern childhood, explore the idea that through a child eyes Christmas means comfort and security and in this particular version demonstrate that it's never too early in life to develop a really eccentric voice.
