Every other producer of music programmes can take the week off because the show of the week has been produced by Steve Urquhart. Music to Strip to (11 July, 11.30am, Radio 4) meets some of the biggest stars of contemporary burlesque – we’re talking Darlinda Just Darlinda, Aurora Galore, Luna Tik Tok and Nasty Canaste here – about the technicalities of what they do. His entry point is the music they choose to strip to and why. After you’ve heard a few pieces, you feel you could pick your own. In an opening sequence that ought to win some kind of award, a number of voices, male as well as female, explain exactly what’s coming off on each particular beat and where you should bump and where it’s more advisable to grind. Public service broadcasting.
They should consider an evening of burlesque music for some future season of the Proms. This year’s begins with a special edition of In Tune (14 July, 4.30pm, Radio 3) from the Imperial College Union in which Sean Rafferty and Suzi Klein introduce British vocal ensemble I Fagiolini, who are marking the 450th anniversary of Monteverdi’s birth. This is an appetiser for the first night of the proms which features the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Edward Gardner, presenting a BBC commission by Tom Coult; Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto and Harmonium by John Adams.
RisingTideFallingStar (Weekdays, 9.45am, Radio 4) is a new book from Philip Hoare, which is read by Tobias Menzies in the Book of the Week slot. It starts, as most Philip Hoare books do, with him swimming on his own in the dark in a strange sea.
Comic duo Alex Owen and Ben Ashenden are back with a new series of The Pin (13 July, 6.30pm, Radio 4), which starts with a sketch making the best use of the chimes of Big Ben I’ve ever heard. The Sunday Feature (9 July, 6.45pm, Radio 3) tells the story of EM Forster’s clandestine gay novel Maurice. This is part of Gay Britannia, a season across the BBC marking the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act, under which umbrella you’ll also find The Love That Wrote Its Name, a series of The Essay (Weekdays, 10.45pm, Radio 3) in which Simon Callow, Stella Duffy, Gregory Woods and others offer personal homages to historic gay relationships.
The first episode of family-history podcast Twice Removed that I came upon turns out to have been the last. The producers have admitted that they couldn’t afford to resource the programme. It’s the kind of thing that radio ought to be able to support. This last one, Ginny, starts with somebody buying their 93-year-old grandpa a DNA-testing kit for his birthday. Then they were offered the chance to see if he matched anybody else on the database. Now what could possibly go wrong with that? “In one moment everything you thought you knew about your family was unbraiding …”
