All political careers end in failure but few did it so quickly as David Cameron’s. He came to power promising not to “bang on about Europe” and ended up having the continent’s name chiselled into to the lid of his political coffin. In The Cameron Years (8 January, 8pm, Radio 4) Steve Richards looks back at Cameron’s prime ministerial career and wonders how much of it will come to be defined by the mother of all hospital passes he threw in the direction of Theresa May at its end. Interviewees include Craig Oliver, Oliver Letwin, Jacob Rees-Mogg but, oddly enough, not the editor of the Evening Standard.
Mongolia is a country of only three million souls. One million of them live in Ulaanbaatar, where, despite the skyscrapers, half the population sleep in tents. One of the few Mongolians to become famous outside his home country is Ariunbaatar Ganbaatar, who won the BBC Cardiff singer of the world prize. Ganbaatar was born to a family of nomadic herders and schooled in the ancient art of longsong. He’s not the only Mongolian to emerge on to the opera or ballet stage in recent years. According to Kate Molleson in From the Steppes to the Stage (11 January, 11.30am, Radio 4) it’s the combination of superb physique and old fashioned Soviet-era music education that gives Mongolian singers their unique power.
Danny Baker alumnus Amy Lamé gets her own show in the shape of Amy Lamé’s Sunday Service (7 January, 4pm, 6 Music) while her old sponsor continues to ply his inimitable trade via The Danny Baker Show (6 January, 9am, 5 Live). This features the Sausage Sandwich Game, which is, as he would say, precisely the kind of thing Marconi had in mind when he legged it down the patent office.
No less distinctive is another short series of Barry’s Forgotten Musical Masterpieces (9 January, 10pm, Radio 2) in which Barry Humphries mines that seam of old popular music that lives on the corner of Comfy and Weird. Here he has Jack Hylton celebrating aviatrix Amy Johnson, Noël Coward’s original Mad About the Boy and recordings of Christopher Stone, who in 1927 became the first DJ on the BBC.
This Podcast Has Fleas is a new comedy podcast from WNYC, aimed at children. It concerns the adventures of an over-enthusiastic dog called Waffles (Emily Lynne) and a cat called Jones (Jay Pharoah) with a taste for Auto-Tune. Alec Baldwin, who’s named as one of the producers, occasionally turns up as the sage goldfish Mr Glub.
Meanwhile, the UK radio channel Fun Kids is also putting a lot of work into podcasts for children. It does extended regular specials dealing with books and science as well as scores of short-form podcasts on perennial favourites such as The Muppets and Horrid Henry. It also goes above and beyond with podcasts helping youngsters to learn a few useful Polish phrases and others advising parents on proper nutrition.
