Facebook and Google aside, it seems the only people who make money out of the internet are the young ones who manage to persuade anxious older ones (the ones with all the money) that they have worked out an entirely new way of doing things. If you’re in that line of work, it’s vital to sell your business to one of the established businesses before you’re either rumbled or superseded. In The Kids Who Decide What All The Other Kids Talk About (Friday, 11am, Radio 4) Paul Mason spends time with Social Chain, a business set up by university dropouts to harness the power of social media to sell advertising. Social Chain has aggregated a number of Twitter feeds popular with young people and accepts money for including commercial messages in those feeds. Is this simply the logical conclusion of a connected world or something potentially more worrying? Do people recognise the difference between editorial and advertising or do they assume that everything nowadays falls into the latter category?
To mark the fact that Bob Dylan can’t be bothered to pick up his Nobel prize for literature in person, two programmes nonetheless mark the fact that he’s been honoured in this fashion. Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour (Sunday, 1pm, 6 Music) is a repeat of the episode of his radio show devoted to songs about the culture of the wireless. Directly afterwards, there’s The Weekend Documentary: Bob Dylan – In So Many Words (Sunday, 2pm, BBC World Service), which looks at why his songs continue to resonate but his public positions seem so hard to decipher. That’s the genius of Dylan: we know no more about him than we did in 1963.
Back in the previous century, David Renwick wrote the celebrated “answering the question before last” Mastermind sketch for the Two Ronnies, so he gets a free pass to feature another pastiche of the famous quiz in his new show Desolation Jests (Tuesday, 11pm, Radio 4). Here it takes its place alongside other imagined entertainments, such as the Klutz Brothers’ classic A Day At The Proctologists and Mace And Dixon’s The Fiancee Of Frankenstein.
If you have not yet consulted that valuable source of showbusiness anecdote and reflection known as Dora Dale, then a good place to start would be Pleased To Meet You: A Very Dora Christmas (Friday, 10.30pm, Radio 4 Extra). In this programme we hear what she can remember about being at the recording session that produced Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody and also sharing a bill with the pre-fame Beatles at Hamburg’s Bang Bang Club. As usual, Ms Dale’s interlocutor is Mr Martin Kelner.
Martin Jarvis directs an all-star cast, including Toby Stephens, Tom Conti, Alfred Molina, John Sessions, Janet Montgomery and Julian Sands, in his dramatisation of Ian Fleming’s 1959 nuclear thriller James Bond: Thunderball (Saturday, 2.30pm, Radio 4).
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