In Door Stepping (Weekdays, 1.45pm, Radio 4), Jude Rogers does something that many of us have toyed with doing: she goes back and revisits the different homes she has lived in. This begins with a small house in Wales where she spent her first five years. Of course, she now finds that it has been extended and knocked about by subsequent occupiers. As she explores the old spaces she tries to distinguish between what she actually remembers and what emotional responses the act of remembering has gradually reinforced. It’s a very moving listen, particularly when she enters her childhood bedroom and we hear the Langley Schools Music Project singing In My Room, Brian Wilson’s song inspired by the same experience.
The Book at Bedtime is Amanda Craig’s black comedy The Lie of the Land (Weeknights, 10.45pm, Radio 4), in which Quentin and Lottie find their previously congenial life of the mind brought to an end by the financial crisis and his infidelity. Unable to afford a divorce, they are forced to monetise their only asset – a house in London – and move to darkest Devon, where daily life is very different from the weekend idylls of their vanished Eden and both they and their children face challenges altogether nastier and more real.
Some of the vintage comedy on Radio 4 Extra wasn’t very funny to begin with, whereas some things just get funnier regardless of the changes in public attitudes over the years. One of these is explored by Maureen Lipman in Gay Britannia: The Bona History of Julian and Sandy (29 July, 5.30pm, Radio 4 Extra). Many of Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick’s insanely optimistic business enterprises are here. There’s Rentachap and Ballet Bona, but the best gag is still the solicitors’ firm Bona Law.
The 30 for 30 strand started life as a series of behind-the-scenes docs for the sports channel ESPN. It has now spawned an equally fascinating series of podcasts. Like the films, these podcasts don’t rely on access, the usual currency of sports journalism, and are strangely excited by stories that are complicated and require telling at length. A good example is A Queen of Sorts, which tells the story of how poker star Phil Ivey and a young Chinese woman called Cheung Yin Sun took on the world’s biggest casino for fun, profit and revenge. These are the kind of people who bet $150,000 a hand because they had found a way of beating the odds.
These podcasts are packed with information – unlike Deserter, which is an entirely different kind of thing: basically two blokes in south London chatting over a pint. As the cares of the day dissolve amid its entirely genial babble, I’m reminded of the Seinfeld routine where he notes: “Women want to know what men are thinking about. I’ll tell you what men are thinking about. Nothing.”
