One of the pleasures of Christmas radio lies in sneaking off from the family to complete a domestic task in the other room while listening to some strange old music show. This festive edition of Barry Humphries: Barry’s Forgotten Musical Christmas (Christmas Day, 6pm, Radio 2) will hit the spot. If you’ve never heard this before it’s a good opportunity to try Humphries’s very specific aesthetic, which lives on the border of cosy and spooky. He remembers his mother boiling the sixpence pieces prior to putting them in the pudding in case they’d been in the pockets of common people. The music comes from the Comedian Harmonists, Gene Autry, Jack Hylton and beyond. It’s a mix that slips down well with advocaat, or indeed any brightly coloured drink that has spent months in a cupboard.
Peter Kay has been a fan of Johnnie Walker so long he felt he ought to write him a letter to let him know. This led to Johnnie Walker Meets Peter Kay (Friday, 5pm, Radio 2) in which the pair drive around Manchester discussing old records, the contexts in which they first heard them and the equipment through which they were played. Their conversation ranges across such topics as the days of five-CD auto-changers in the boot, records with good fades, borrowing Dad’s headphones with the volume controls on either ear and the curious power of spoken bits on records. In between, they play music by the Everly Brothers, Gary US Bonds, the Beatles and many others. It’s a congenial listen; proof, if more proof were needed, that there are few things more sentimental than old blokes talking about old records.
It has been scientifically proven that Christmas reaches a benign peak in that short period just before lunch when even the most laggardly adolescents have got up and nobody has over-indulged enough to make them quarrelsome. Into this interlude of harmony somebody has wisely inserted Just A Minute Does Panto! (Christmas Day, 1.15pm, Radio 4) in which Paul Merton, Sheila Hancock, Katherine Ryan and Rufus Hound seek to get away with as much as they can under the chairmanship of Nicholas Parsons.
In the second part of Tommy Steele At 80 (Boxing Day, 10pm, Radio 2) Bill Kenwright talks to the Bermondsey boy who survived being Britain’s first rock’n’roll star, became a major musical comedy star and still has a few stories to tell. And the dependable John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme (Tuesday, 6.30pm, Radio 4) starts its sixth season with a seasonal special.
I trust there have been no attempts to improve A Festival Of Nine Lessons And Carols (Christmas Eve, 3pm, Radio 4) from King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. As ever, there’s a freshly commissioned carol and we’re promised carols in French, Spanish and German, but the essential shape of one of radio’s great annual dramas remains untouched.
