Some musicians avoid other people’s music because they find it a threat or they’re worried that they’ll plagiarise it. Bruce Springsteen isn’t like that, so he ought to be an interesting guest on Desert Island Discs (Sunday, 11.15am, Radio 4). He used to compile the mixtapes which they used as front-of-house music before his shows, and these were usually made up of songs you felt you ought to know but didn’t. I’d happily listen to him talking for half an hour about any of those. “This is the music that electrified me,” he says. “These songs galvanised me into changing my life in some way”.
Like that other live entertainment experience – the concert – the annual visit to Santa is now being prolonged beyond the limits of endurance in order to justify an increased ticket price. In The Untold: Desperately Seeking Santa (Monday, 11am, Radio 4) Ben, who’s in charge of a “grotto experience” at a garden centre in the Midlands, is looking for people who have got sufficiently inside the character of the man from the north pole to sustain a 30-minute conversation with a four-year-old. That’s a long time if the agenda remains confined to what the kids have asked for and whether they’ve been good this year. Unsurprisingly, Ben’s job isn’t easy. Makes you wonder what all our underemployed actors are doing this time of the year.
Catherine Morland, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (Weekdays, 10.45am, Radio 4) has, like many young women at the time, always got her nose in a gothic romance. As a supplement to the above brisk, funny adaptation of the great novel, members of the same cast star in an adaptation of Ann Radcliffe’s Adolpho – the book Catherine is obsessed with – which is due for broadcast at 2.30pm on New Year’s Eve.
There are, as poet Imtiaz Dharker points out in The Sigh (Monday, 8pm, Radio 4), many different forms of sighing. There’s one on waking, another on getting out of bed and a key one when tasting the day’s first cup of tea. A subject perfectly suited to radio, sighing is a release of emotions we only notice once we’ve released them. In this programme, she considers its role in literature, music, religion and life.
Tori Amos makes her radio-drama debut as the Copper Beech Tree in the dramatisation of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust (Sat, 2.30pm, Sun, 3pm, Radio 4) alongside Matthew Beard, Sophie Rundle, Eleanor Bron, Charlotte Riley and a host of stars. This is a part Gaiman originally wrote with her in mind, which served as the inspiration for her song Horses.
As festivities approach, Sue Perkins’ Christmas Comedy Stocking (Saturday, 9am, Radio 4 Extra) sees the nation’s favourite introduce some of her most cherished broadcasts from programmes such as Radio Active, The Masterson Inheritance and I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Christmas Carol.
