Listeners sleeping off Sunday lunch during The Archers are likely to jerk awake during Natural Histories: Original Short Stories (Sunday, 7.45pm, Radio 4) when they hear Lionel Shriver luxuriating in the recollection of the day Chuck tore her knickers off. She was so delighted by the idea that she thought of having that particular pair framed. Her short story A Total Neanderthal takes its name from the words with which her girlfriend dismissed this latest boyfriend. The notional Chuck is 5ft 6in in his hairy feet, knows how to start a fire and, more to the point, how to prevent foxes trespassing upon Shriver’s garden in Primrose Hill. She prefers Chuck to her usual boyfriends, who increasingly require a notarised contract before they will agree to put their hand down there. Not so Chuck. One of the delights of this story is wondering how many meetings had to be convened in the Biddy Baxter Room before its script could be “complied”.
By any standard measure Ardent Records of Memphis, Tennessee was one of the least successful record labels in history. The main reason it qualifies for a profile such as the Ardent Records Story (Wednesday, 10pm, Radio 2) is that Ardent recorded and released the first two albums by the commercially unsuccessful but subsequently influential Memphis group Big Star. The owner John Fry and the engineer John Hampton, who also worked with such Ardent clients as Led Zeppelin and the White Stripes, both died last year, not long after giving interviews to Mark Hagen, who produced this tribute.
No pop star is ever forgotten once they’ve had a Christmas hit. Kim Wilde, whose contribution is Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree with Mel Smith, is Sara Cox’s guest on Sounds Of The 80s (Saturday, 10pm, Radio 2). That hardy Australian import Kylie Minogue needs no such special pass. She’s Kirsty Young’s castaway on Desert Island Discs (Sunday, 11.15am, Radio 4). Meanwhile, the 20 episodes of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (Weekdays, 2.30pm, Radio 4 Extra), which are narrated by Stephen Fry and star Emma Fielding as Becky Sharp, should see you through any tree-decoration or present-wrapping duties on these dark afternoons.
It’s a fact of life that whenever politicians wish to recommend a course of action to the nation, they always say: “It’s been tried here [insert name of snowy country north of where we live] and it’s gone awfully well.” They never say the same thing about Greece or Portugal or Turkey. Somehow the north is a region we associate with sobriety and rectitude. In the Sunday Feature: True Norse (Sunday, 6.45pm, Radio 3) Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough takes listeners behind these countries’ “elegant, minimal facade on a journey to the heart of Norse culture”. A good start is not to mention the war, which all these nations have different varieties of mixed feelings about.
Speaking of which, in Shoah In Jerusalem (Sunday, 1.30pm, Radio 4) Jonathan Freedland tells the story of the Jerusalem premiere 30 years ago of Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary about the Holocaust. He talks to people who were present at an event that clearly transcended cinema. Watching it in the company of people who had lived through the events it recollected was a unique experience. Freedland remembers going to see it in London when he was 19. His friend took popcorn and began to eat it. A middle-aged woman with a eastern European accent turned round and smacked him on the legs, saying: “Have you no respect?”
