In Every Third Thought (Weekdays, 9.45am, Radio 4), Robert McCrum notes that before one’s 60th birthday one may simply fall. However, after one’s 60th birthday you “have a fall”, which is a different thing altogether. McCrum had a serious stroke at the age of 42 in 1995, and since then has spent more time than most thinking about the inevitable. This series of ruminations, read by Nicky Henson, might be subtitled Mortality for Baby Boomers. “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls,” as he quotes from John Donne, “it tolls for thee.” McCrum then puts it in terms some boomers might find easier to understand: at this particular gig there are no guestlist privileges. As Keith Richards once pointed out, the older you get, the older you want to get.
The peerless Alison Steadman and Phil Davis play parents waiting to be introduced to their son’s girlfriend in Richard Herring’s new comedy Relativity (6 September, 11.30am, Radio 4). The entire family converge on the old homestead to join in the fun of deciding whether she is The One. In a similar but less comic case of a comedian mining his personal life for material, Marcus Brigstocke has written The Red (5 September, 2.15pm, Radio 4) about a father who has bequeathed his recovering alcoholic son a cellar of fine wine. Rufus Jones plays the son, David Calder is the father.
Country is the label people tend to attach to any American music that has lyrics that tell a story. The excellent Oklahoma singer-songwriter John Moreland plays country-ish music from the point of view of somebody who arrived at it via punk and hardcore. He’ll be singing live and talking to Cerys Matthews (3 September, 10am, 6 Music).
Both traditional broadcasters and podcasters are betting heavily on the growth of voice-driven technology and so-called smart speakers, the theory being that it is as easy to ask Amazon’s Alexa to play you the Guardian Books podcast as it is to get it to play Capital FM. The interfaces aren’t faultless but they’re learning from their mistakes and getting better by the day.
Talking about smart thinking, The British-made Brain Training Podcast is a brief daily workout for the mind that could easily get addictive. Each episode presents you with three rounds. Add some numbers. What were the subtotals? Listen to these five five-letter words. Now try to recall the second letter of the third word. It’s slickly produced and not encumbered by ads.
The Weeds is a timely podcast from the news and opinion website Vox. It leaves the coverage of the Punch and Judy politics to others and confines itself to the details of policy. In recent weeks, Ezra Klein, Sarah Kliff and Matthew Yglesias have looked at issues such as immigration and inequality in the kind of detail most podcasts have no time for.
