Talking To Strangers (Thursday, 11pm, Radio 4) is a monologue format that was first developed for the stage by Sally Phillips and Lily Bevan, who star in it, with guest appearances from, among others, Jessica Hynes, Emma Thompson and Olivia Colman. It works perfectly on radio because the ear accepts without question the shift from the middle-class mother trying to bully her shiftless son through his A-levels (“Derby are D-D-D, but then they are Derby”); to the girl telling her boyfriend she invented a twin sister just in order to maintain his interest (“The other one’s me full of Malibu in a wig”); the woman ringing last night’s ill-advised hook-up to say “thanks for the sex”; and the tattoo artist attempting to land a helicopter on her client’s backside (“Clare had her anniversary trip to Miss Saigon,” she explains). You’ll smile, you’ll smirk, and – when it comes to the woman paralysed with fright halfway up a pole on a corporate team-building exercise on the Isle of Wight – you will, I promise, laugh out loud.
The doyenne of English folk singers, Shirley Collins, was 80 last year and communicates beautifully about music on Private Passions (Sunday, 12noon, Radio 3). The key to singing folk songs, she says, is to remember you’re just singing the song, you’re not selling it. Among her choices are Handel, Boyce, Praetorius and Mississippi Fred McDowell. She discovered and made a recording of Mississippi Fred in the late 50s while driving in the deep south with her then-boyfriend, archivist Alan Lomax. She still frets that the fact that the Rolling Stones later covered one of his songs may have hastened Fred’s demise. I fancy he wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“Every generation proclaims its uniqueness. But while clothes and conventions change, human nature doesn’t. Human nature is very much a Forsyte, most comfortable with what it knows and can control.” The Forsytes (Saturday, 2.30pm, Radio 4), John Galsworthy’s soap-like saga of a wealthy Victorian family trying to control its younger generation, is always ready for another run-out. This new dramatisation by Shaun McKenna, starring Joseph Millson as the Rob Titchener-like Soames Forsyte, and Juliet Aubrey as his trophy wife Irene, starts with a 90-minute feature-length episode ideal for accompanying the ironing on a dark winter’s afternoon.
Speaking of domestic routine, if you have to be up and about indecently early in the morning then you could make yourself a consoling cup of tea in solitude and listen to Rumpole (Tuesday, 6am, Radio 4 Extra). This is the beginning of a 13-part series of adventures featuring John Mortimer’s fictional barrister. This version is graced by the performance of the late Maurice Denham in the title role. It will leave you with the reassurance that all is well with the world and will probably significantly add to your store of knowledge on the subject of blood stains.
One of the best programmes of last year was an episode of Archive On 4 simply made up of old interviews with John Lennon. The producers of that show have taken the same approach with David Bowie: Verbatim (Saturday, 8pm, Radio 4), featuring some of the most memorable interviews with the man who couldn’t resist giving a reporter a good headline, and often made a habit of blurting out the first thing that came into his head on being confronted by the awed interviewer and their expectant recorder.
