I venture to suggest that Simon Cowell will be remembered longer than most of his acts. Future moguls will wonder how this man managed to hypnotise an entire nation on the basis of so little memorable music. Meanwhile, like the superstars of pop that his TV machine replaced, Cowell chooses the interviewers he’s prepared to talk to and makes sure he gets plenty of plugs for his charity work. In It’s A Yes From Me - The Simon Cowell Story (Wednesday, 10pm, Radio 2), he sits down with talent manager Jonathan Shalit and talks about his successes and occasional failures, and chooses the music that means the most to him. No One Direction, apparently.
It’s 80 years since the launch of the UK’s first television service. On that occasion, the delights to come were heralded in glutinous song by one Adele Dixon. On this anniversary, Tony Hatch As Heard On TV (Tuesday, 10pm, Radio 2) slips the foil wrapper from a selection box of those TV themes we have loved, many of which sound curiously exposed once ripped from the moorings of the schedule. Hatch, who penned such classics of the genre as the themes from Crossroads, Neighbours and Emmerdale, is your expert guide to why a good theme and a good piece of music are not always the same thing.
We’re getting used to the idea of listening to a stream of music, whether we’ve compiled it ourselves or had it provided by experts. The challenge for radio is making its specialist knowledge available to listeners without thwarting the flow. Radio 3 is pioneering a new approach this week. During River Of Music (Sunday, 9.03am, Radio 3) – which is an uninterrupted 12 hours of music celebrating the station’s 70 years on the air – the presenters Rob Cowan and Sarah Walker will be providing an online commentary on the pieces via the Radio 3 site and will engage with listeners via Facebook and Twitter.
David Simon, inventor of The Wire and other fine TV products, kicks off The Essay: The Book That Changed Me (Weekdays, 10.45pm, Radio 3) on Monday with his tribute to Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Later in the week, Pauline Black of the Selecter, Ben Anderson of Vice News, artist Tacita Dean and theatre director Richard Eyre have their say.
The Fair Intellectual Club (Thursday, 6.30pm, Radio 4) is Lucy Porter’s sitcom set in pre-Enlightenment Edinburgh in the course of which Isaac Newton visits the city and, with the help of this secret society for the scholarly improvement of young ladies, begins to sort out gravity.
Some of the cleverest, most suspenseful movies of the 70s were adapted from stories by Ira Levin. He was the man behind The Boys From Brazil and The Stepford Wives. The earlier Rosemary’s Baby, which was so memorably filmed by Roman Polanski in 1968, is read by Kim Cattrall in Fright Night (Saturday, 10.02pm, Radio 4).
