In The Blame Game (Tuesday, 8pm, Radio 4) former MI5 boss Eliza Manningham-Buller meets people whose professional world came crashing down when they were made to carry the can for systemic breakdown and the media, both professional and social, went looking for somebody to blame. In these cases the payouts have to be huge to make up for career-ending disgrace. Former children’s services chief Sharon Shoesmith, sacked over the Baby P death, has applied for scores of jobs since leaving Haringey council but has yet to be granted an interview. Rupert Soames, chief executive of Serco, starts every week with the assumption that it’s only a matter of time before he is fired for something he didn’t do and in all probability didn’t know about. Football manager Steve Coppell understands that the minute the owner of the club comes under pressure from fans then his days are numbered. Hence he jumps before being pushed.
The wickedly confiding tone of Grace Dent is perfect for topping and tailing the tangled real-life stories that make up The Untold (Monday, 11am, Radio 4). This one concerns former soldier Rob Lawrie, who was arrested for trying to smuggle a four-year-old Afghan refugee into the UK. Like all the truest stories, this one is more complicated than it appears. Rob suffers from bipolar disorder and his efforts to help a family in Calais have resulted in the unravelling of his own in Leeds. Now he is visited by Hollywood film-makers wishing to bring his story to the big screen, probably without most of the frayed edges that make it interesting rather than heroic.
David Tennant stars as Jimmy Porter in a 60th anniversary production of John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger (Saturday, 2.30pm, Radio 4) and reflects on its reception in 1956 in Tennant Looks Back At Osborne (Saturday, 8pm, Radio 4), which features the memories of many people who were there at the time. The world that it was so violently objecting to has vanished now. Listening to Osborne’s condescending drawl, it’s difficult to believe that he could ever have regarded himself as the bottom of the social pile.
In The Listening Service (Sunday, 5pm, Radio 3) Tom Service recalls a time when audiences didn’t know how to react to pieces of music that we now know are “classic”. The story of music one of composers pandering to and then trying to wrongfoot audiences. When Mozart debuted his Paris symphony in 1778 he knew the audience would applaud as soon as the 40-strong string section weighed in; when Haydn wrote his oratorio The Creation 20 years later he started with a section of apparent incoherence that his listeners would have found unsettling; when Wagner unveiled The Ring he started in darkness with an E flat major – then the longest-held musical note in history. The arrival of recording put paid to such surprise starts.
