Programmes about hair are rarely just programmes about hair. Particularly when they’re presented by someone with as notable a mane as Professor Mary Beard. Glad To Be Grey (Friday, 11am, Radio 4) is more interested in how comfortable people are with the truth than the ins and outs of hair care. In the course of her survey, Beard talks to Jo Hansford, London’s go-to woman when it comes to hair colour, who estimates that more than 75% of women over the age of 40 she encounters on the streets of London will not be wearing the shade that nature and anno domini have decreed. She talks to the proudly grey 90-year-old Joan Burstein of London fashion outlet Browns, who remembers that she first came under pressure to have her hair coloured by her son, who was worried what a grey mother might say about him. She also prods fellow classicist Professor Simon Goldhill to come out on air in a discussion about men and hair colouring. This will have occasioned much nervous loosening of male collars throughout the BBC.
One of the pleasures of the recent dramatisation of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte novels was to be reminded how, in London, the shabby artists’ quarters of yesteryear tend to become the millionaires rows of today. When young Jolyon Forsyte disappeared to St John’s Wood with his mistress it was the first time his crusty old dad had ever ventured that far north of “the Park” into a suburb so disreputable. There’s something similar at work in The Arts Exodus (Monday, 4pm, Radio 4), during which Deborah Coughlin explores what an artistic presence means to a community. She remembers not being able to afford to move to Shoreditch when leaving art college in 2000. So she went to Clapton and now even that has become gentrified in a big way. In her quest to find places where artists can afford to live and work, she goes to Margate, which now has lots of artists as well as the highest density of former editors of women’s glossy magazines in the world. She talks to the people charged with making sure that world cities like New York, Paris and London keep at least some of their creatives.
In Simon Schama: The Obliterators (Sunday, 1.30pm, Radio 4) Schama ponders the thinking that the perpetrators might see as justifying the destruction of ancient sites such as Mosul and Palmyra in what we still call the cradle of civilisation. What he finds is a rich tradition of similar behaviour in this country, rooted in our 17th-century Puritan version of Islamic State who roamed the nation destroying what they saw as Romish idolatry. The people who carry out these acts are quick to point out how their holy book excuses their behaviour. Beneath this there’s also a streak of old-fashioned vandals’ delight. We never seem to give sufficient weight to the Marlon Brando defence when it comes to Isis. This will be familiar to anyone who saw The Wild One: what are you rebelling against, Johnny? Whaddya got?
Trial By Laughter (Saturday, 2.30pm, Radio 4) is a play written by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman that recounts the story of how bookseller, publisher and satirist William Hone found himself in the dock in 1817 on a charge of “impious blasphemy and seditious libel”. What Hone found in the early 19th century still holds good today: nothing is more liable to leave you staring at a law suit than the suggestion that a figure in authority is fat •
