Progressive rock was invented in the late 60s to provide grammar school boys with something to do while everyone else was dancing. The boys liked progressive because it looked deucedly difficult and required a lot of kit. Although prog is entitled to as much or as little respect as any other branch of pop music, I think it’s always important to keep that core absurdity in mind. In Prog Rock With Charles Hazlewood (Monday, 10pm, Radio 2) the distinguished conductor talks to Bill Bruford, the drummer with Yes and King Crimson during the first golden era of prog, and looks for the parallels between rock and classical music.
Drags To Riches (Monday, 11am, Radio 4) talks to three different drag entrepreneurs, from Peggy Lee, who plies a traditional trade in the Canaries, Walt Utz of the Supreme Fabulettes, who are big in the West End and are in growing demand for gay weddings, and Amy Redmond, who organises gay balls with as many as 3,000 drag queens, lots of them with actual beards. It could never be anything other than an enjoyable listen, and while it tells you more about where the male member is hidden when the performer wears tight leggings than you might need to know, it will also restore your faith in the massive unpredictability of humankind, as hinted at by the drag artist who tell us he has worked three funerals in the last year.
Ed Reardon’s Week (Wednesday, 11.30am, Radio 4) is back. I always picture Christopher Douglas and Andrew Nickolds’s creation as one of those people who foregather wherever book publishers reach for the corkscrew. Reardon’s tribe usually carry a swag bag over their shoulder, have this very newspaper jammed in the pocket of their bodywarmer, a glass of warm white wine in their hand, and a bitchy aside primed and ready to go. Guests in this series include Pam Ferris, Celia Imrie and Jeremy Paxman. Talking of new series, Desert Island Discs (Sunday, 11.15am, Radio 4) returns this week with special guest Bradley Wiggins.
Teatime At Peggy’s (Friday, 11am, Radio 4) involves dropping round for seed cake and samosas with “Aunty” Peggy Cantem at her home in Jhansi, the town south of Delhi that inspired the novel and film Bhowani Junction. Peggy is a nonagenarian Anglo-Indian, the group who had a special position in the days of the Raj, running the railways, postal and telephone operations, but have now dwindled to no more than 30 families in that city and fewer than 100,000 across the country. Peggy tends what remains of Jhansi’s Anglo-Indian cemetery and remembers a vanished world.
If you’re the kind of person whose heart leaps when you hear that two blokes have set out to retrace the steps of Carruthers, the hero of Erskine Childers’s original spy novel The Riddle Of The Sands, allow me to warmly recommend the accompanying podcast (riddleofthesands.net) in which, among other adventures, said blokes Lloyd and Tim visit the last ship’s chandler in London and sample Raven Mixture pipe tobacco. It feels almost subversive just to listen to them puffing away.
Funniest sound of the week is John Moloney’s rendition of the noise his cat made when the vet introduced a thermometer to said feline’s fundament. It’s this key event that the rest of the deliciously gradual John Moloney Show (Tuesday, 11pm, Radio 4) is leading up to and then falls away from. I also liked his description of how he coaxed said cat to the vet. “I dropped him in the box, using gravity as my primary weapon”.
