SATURDAY 21 MARCH 2015

SAT 00:00 15 Minute Drama (b04hyvtm)
Marcy Kahan - Lunch
The Whole Enchilada
by Marcy Kahan
Bella has made some life changing decisions but Bill has an announcement of his own.
Directed by Sally Avens.
SAT 00:15 Shakespeare's Restless World (b01ghgk3)
Toil and Trouble
Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, continues his object-based history. Taking artefacts from William Shakespeare's time, he explores how Elizabethan and Jacobean playgoers made sense of the unstable and rapidly changing world in which they lived.
With old certainties shifting around them, in a time of political and religious unrest and economic expansion, Neil asks what the plays would have meant to the public when they were first performed. He uses carefully selected objects to explore the great issues of the day that preoccupied the public and helped shape the works, and he considers what they can reveal about the concerns and beliefs of Shakespearean England.
Programme 10. TOIL AND TROUBLE - The differences between Scottish and English witches are revealed by a model ship, made to be hung in a church.
Producer: Paul Kobrak.
SAT 00:30 Keith Waterhouse - Billy Liar (b01f9wj6)
Episode 5
Billy's fantasies have all been exposed. Will he leave to start a new life in London? Concluded by Stephen Tompkinson.
SAT 00:45 Sir Harry Secombe - Goon Abroad (b01494gh)
Sports and Swansea
Goon Show star Sir Harry Secombe recalls his school days in Wales, lessons in sportsmanship, and he makes a few confessions.
Conclusion of the autobiography of comedian and singer Sir Harry Secombe.
Abridged by Elizabeth Proud.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in June 1983.
SAT 01:00 The Museum of Curiosity (b016lbpt)
Series 4
Horne, Wheeler, De Botton
Hosted by the Professor of Ignorance from the University of Buckingham John Lloyd C.B.E. and the intensely curious comedian Dave Gorman.
This week's guests:
Alex Horne is a comedian and writer. He co-presents the anarchic BBC4 comedy panel show We Need Answers with Tim Key and Mark Watson. Alex may have started his career as a stand-up comic by winning a Christmas cracker joke writing competition. Since then, his life has been one long experiment, the biggest of which is a project to become the oldest man in the world. He is still alive to this day and climbing up the chart by a hundred places every minute. Alex is also developing his own unique form of beard and has been trying for some time to get a new word of his own invention into the Oxford English Dictionary.
Sara Wheeler is a traveller and travel writer who has been described as the new Eric Newby. Her travel books include Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica; Travels in a Thin Country; and the biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a polar explorer who himself wrote a moving account of his own experience as a survivor of Scott's disastrous 1912 Antarctic expedition. Sara often speaks on behalf of the disenfranchised nomadic peoples of the arctic, such as the Chukchi, who live in the far North Eastern tip of Siberia. When not travelling, Wheeler lives with her family in London.
Alain de Botton is a writer of essayistic books that have been described as a 'philosophy of everyday life' and have been bestsellers in 30 countries. Alain also started and helps to run The School of Life, dedicated to a new vision of education. Alain started writing at a young age. His first book, Essays in Love [titled On Love in the US], was published when he was 23.Alain's next book is titled Religion for Atheists.
SAT 01:30 My Life in Five Books (b0132tgd)
Series 2
Zoe Wicomb
2/4
Zoe Wicomb was born and raised in South Africa and has lived in Scotland since 1994. She's taught in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde and now concentrates on writing.
Her latest book, You Can't get Lost in Cape Town is a collection of short stories about growing up as a young coloured woman in South Africa.
Zoe talked to Stuart about these five books:
1. The Children's Bible
2. Toni Morrison - Beloved.
3. Flannery O'Connor -A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
4. Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart.
5. Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse.
SAT 02:00 Steve May - Last Man Out (b00755g9)
At the end of a night of jazz, only the drummer and the bar manager remain, packing up and picking over the ruins of their lives.
Starring Louise Lombard as Gill and Donald Sumpter as Henry.
Drums: Damian Grant
Director: Ned Chaillet
First broadcast in BBC Radio 4's Thirty Minute Theatre in January 1998.
SAT 02:30 City Messengers (b00d028s)
Documentary following the lives of two of London's 400 cycle couriers, whose working day is spent delivering packages across the city. The job is badly paid and the risk of serious injury is relatively high, yet there is a thriving sub-culture of people who have chosen the freedom of the road above the security of the office.
SAT 03:00 DH Lawrence - Sons and Lovers (b007jlrk)
Episode 3
Gertrude clings to her son Paul, who now turns to a new lover even though he has not forgotten his first love.
Conclusion of DH Lawrence's classic novel dramatised by Michael Butt.
Paul Morel …. Benedict Sandeford
Gertrude Morel …. Elizabeth Estenson
Walter Morel …. Clive Russell
Miriam Leivers …. Fiona Clarke
William …. Joseph Attenborough
Annie …. Andrea Nicholas
Mrs. Radford …. Kate Rutter
Clara Dawes …. Janice Chambers
Baxter Dawes …. Peter Meakin
Director: Claire Grove
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 1999.
SAT 04:00 Afternoon Reading (b00826cw)
Alan Howard Reads
The Sentence
By Nina Raine. A judge looks back on his childhood and a story that he told his children. Read by Alan Howard.
SAT 04:15 Mrs Bradley - The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop (b00947vh)
The Bones of the Matter
Rupert Sethleigh is missing and a headless corpse's been found jointed in the Butcher's Shop.
Rupert's cousin Jimsey is under suspicion, but Mrs Lestrange Bradley has other ideas...
Stars Mary Wimbush as Mrs Bradley, Richard Pearce as Aubrey Harringay, Christopher Scoular as James Redsey, David King as the Vicar of Wandles, Teresa Gallagher as Felicity Broome, Terence Edmond as George William Saville and Norman Bird as Superintendent Bidwell
Glady's Mitchell's story of mayhem and murder dramatised by Elizabeth Proud.
Producer: Sue Wilson
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1991.
SAT 05:00 Beachcomber... By the Way (b0082ckc)
Series 1
Episode 4
Lord Shortcake takes up amateur dramatics, Captain Foulenough takes us back to his unsavoury childhood, Cricket is taken too seriously, and Prodnose is escorted to the graveyard in the hope he’ll take the hint...
Richard Ingrams, John Wells, John Sessions and Patricia Routledge recreate the world of the JB Morton.
Running in the Daily Express from 1924 to 1975 – JB Morton’s surreally comic ‘Beachcomber’ column paved the way for a great deal of modern humour.
Adapted by Michael Barfield with Richard Ingrams.
Announcer: Brian Perkins
Producer: Harry Thompson
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1989
SAT 05:30 Living with the Enemy (b00771zg)
Episode 6
'If you can't get even, get mad'. Gyles goes on the rampage and Sophie turns to gossip.
A night out celebrating turns to disaster for everyone...
Sitcom about a Tory MP-turned-media celebrity and a comedian-turned-holistic therapist.
Written by and starring Nick Revell and Gyles Brandreth
Gyles Brandon ...... Gyles Brandreth
Nick Reynolds ...... Nick Revell
Sophie Okuyu ...... Gugu Mbatha-Raw
Barry ...... Martin Hyder
Asif ...... Dan Mersh
Rick ...... Neil Pearson
Producer: Ed Morrish
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2006.
SAT 06:00 Wally K Daly - What's Stigmata? (b05n2wsz)
4 Extra Debut. What happens when the 'greatest non-believer of all time' develops mystical powers? Stars Peter Jeffrey and Norma Ronald.
SAT 07:15 Colin Dexter Short Stories (b007k4xz)
Inspector Morse - The Burglar
Neighbourly concern about a suspicious stranger sets a new puzzle for the Oxford-based detective. Read by John Turner.
SAT 07:30 Freedom Pass (b00sw6bx)
Episode 7
Using free over-60s travel, Alan Coren and Christopher Matthew head to London Zoo and Regents Park's boating pond. From September 2005.
SAT 08:00 Archive on 4 (b01lsr14)
Inner Voices - The Burton Diaries
The archive of Richard Burton is a rich treasure. The performances are by common consent amongst the most compelling of any age, given in a voice that many have felt to be an aural equivalent of heaven. Hamlet, Under Milk Wood, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Equus stand out, and then there are the blockbusters: Wild Geese, Where Eagles Dare, Anthony and Cleopatra, Night of the Iguana and The Robe. Add to that the poetry readings - Dylan Thomas of course but also Shakespeare and the English Classics. It is a feast for the ears.
Yet it is a remarkable testament to the man and to his life that, just as magnetic as the body of work, is another collection. Through several periods of his life, most notably from the mid-1960s to the early '70s (his 'superstar years') he kept a diary, sometimes handwritten, mostly typed out and assembled in thick notebooks. The diaries provide a unique view of the world in which he moved, among actors and directors, writers and poets, millionaires and royalty. They also give an insight into his approach to acting, his insecurities, his drinking and his volatile relationship with Elizabeth Taylor at a time when they were the most famous couple in the world.
Twenty-five years ago, shortly after Burton's death, Melvyn Bragg was given access to the diaries to write his definitive biography of Burton, Rich. Now, to mark the publication of the complete diaries, Bragg presents an Archive on 4 which examines Burton's life through broadcast interviews and the previously inaccessible lens of his diaries. Bragg returns to Burton to reassesses the man in the light of his own experience and in the light of the private and confessional thoughts that Burton wrote, alone, throughout his life.
Burton was the gifted son of a Welsh miner. He met a remarkable teacher and made the journey to Oxford and on to superstardom - but he was seldom really happy. He was a hellraiser who often behaved appallingly and was accused of squandering an extraordinary talent on drinking and bad movies. If that was all he was then he'd be just a footnote in 20th century culture. But Burton was also a man of wonderful erudition, passion, insight and self- knowledge. He fought his way through life through force of will, love, and voracious reading. It is this side of the man that makes him such a remarkable presence. It is also a side of him captured in a rich vein of BBC archive and interviews.
The diaries show him on top of the world, in love, in despair, and fighting the alcoholism that had killed his father and he knew was killing him. This programme puts the flesh and the voice back into our collective understanding of one of the great cultural figures of the 20th century.
SAT 09:00 Suburbia (b05n3yjq)
What created suburbia, when and how?
In the 19th century the first suburban districts sprang up around city centres (at first London and Manchester) to accommodate those who wanted to escape the squalid conditions of the industrial town. From the mid-19th century the development of the railways (like the Metropolitan line to Middlesex and then Bucks), made it possible for the majority of the city's population to reside outside the city and to commute into the centre for work. The railway could take you from Middlesex to The City, from Bucks to Baker Street. It was the birth of Metroland, as celebrated by poet Sir John Betjeman.
But the suburbs were more than just about planning and building; they developed a culture set apart from the metropolitan influence of the sinful city. In the suburbs grew a whole lifestyle of refinement, respectability and aspiration. And along with their distance from the city came the disdain of the fashionable non-suburbanites: "How very suburban!" became synonymous with a sneering disdain for conventionality.
Simon Fanshawe explores Suburbia as a place of both continuity and change. Through poems, TV sitcom, history and commentary he traces the story of the suburbs – how they came to be – and also their cultural influence on British lifestyle from fashion, architecture, music, morals, gardening and social one-upmanship. From Betjeman to Reggie Perrin through, amongst other things, Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party, Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole, TV sitcom The Good Life, the sketches of Monty Python, and the birth of punk rock.
Simon explores what the suburbs were originally, what they have become and how; despite changes in demographics and social mobility, they still typify a very British set of values. The programme also features exclusive interviews with the likes of Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Penelope Keith.
Producer: Mike Greenwood
Made for BBC Radio 4 Extra by Pier Productions.
SAT 12:00 Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years (Omnibus) (b05n40rr)
Episode 2
An unexpected romantic encounter in the grocery aisle sparks the beginning of a new adventure for homely Delia Grinstead.
Anne Tyler's unsettling story about marriage, family and hope.
Delia Grinstead's new job in the sleepy town of Bay Borough draws her into the business of another fractured family.
Omnibus of the last five of ten episodes dramatised by Rebecca Lenkiewicz.
Delia ...... Nancy Crane
Adrian ...... Ian Conningham
Sam ...... Nathan Osgood
Eliza ...... Jessica Turner
Rosemary ...... Rhiannon Neads
Skipper ...... David Acton
Carroll ...... Sam Valentine
Driscoll ...... Mark Edel-Hunt
Susie ...... Roslyn Hill
Director: David Hunter
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March 2015.
SAT 13:10 Inheritance Tracks (b05nxj07)
Ulrika Jonsson
The television presenter chooses Verdi's The Grand March from Aida and Oppna Landskap by Ulf Lundell.
SAT 13:15 Baldi (b00wfzw9)
Series 5
The Million-Dollar Question
Paolo Baldi - Franciscan priest turned Dublin sleuth - investigates the mysterious deaths of members of a rockabilly band. What is the connection to patterns of squares and triangles?
Starring David Threlfall as Paolo Baldi, Tina Kellegher as Tina Mahon, TP McKenna as Father Troy, Owen Roe as Rynne, Diana Quick as Angela , Gerry O'Brien as Chuck, Frank O'Sullivan as Tuohy, Kieran Lagan as Dr Graham, Patrick Fitzsymons as Anto and The Sabre Jets as The Sun Boys.
Murder mystery written by Barry Devlin.
Format by Barry Devlin. Developed and produced by BBC Northern Ireland.
Directed in Belfast by Lawrence Jackson.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2008.
SAT 14:00 Barry Cryer - Rock of Ages (b0076g2s)
Barry Cryer as you've never heard him before - belting out the blues, and a string of classic gags. From his hit 2002 Edinburgh Fringe show.
Ably assisted by Tottenham's finest rocker Ronnie Golden and featuring top rockers Ronnie And The Rex featuring Pete Turtle, Richard Simmons and Richard Allen.
Scripted by Barry Cryer, Ronnie Golden and John Dowie.
Producer: Dave Cohen.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in July 2003.
SAT 15:00 Archive on 4 (b01lsr14)
[Repeat of broadcast at 08:00 today]
SAT 16:00 Wally K Daly - What's Stigmata? (b05n2wsz)
[Repeat of broadcast at 06:00 today]
SAT 17:15 Colin Dexter Short Stories (b007k4xz)
[Repeat of broadcast at 07:15 today]
SAT 17:30 John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme (b01mqqb1)
Series 2
Episode 2
John Finnemore, the writer and star of Cabin Pressure, regular guest on The Now Show and popper-upper in things like Miranda and Family Guy, records a second series of his hit sketch show.
The first series was described as "sparklingly clever" by The Daily Telegraph and "one of the most consistently funny sketch shows for quite some time" by The Guardian. It featured Winnie the Pooh coming to terms with his abusive relationship with honey, how The Archers sounds to people who don't listen to the Archers and how Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde decided whose turn it was to do the washing up.
Of those things, this episode includes another sketch about how the Archers sounds to people who don't listen to the Archers, as well a song about a dog and a sketch about a mathematician's agent.
John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme is written by and stars John Finnemore. It also features Margaret Cabourn-Smith, Simon Kane, Lawry Lewin and Carrie Quinlan. Original music is by Susannah Pearse. It is produced by Ed Morrish.
SAT 18:00 Simon Guerrier - Graceless (b01l1lpf)
Series 1
The Fog
Abby and Zara arrive in Compton in 1912, where they sample local beer and get arrested. Stars Ciara Janson and David Warner.
Abby - Ciara Janson
Zara - Laura Doddington
Marek - Fraser James
Daniel - David Warner
Nan - Patricia Brake
Nicholas - Alex Mallinson
Written by Simon Guerrier
Directed by Lisa Bowerman
A Big Finish Production.
SAT 19:00 Suburbia (b05n3yjq)
[Repeat of broadcast at 09:00 today]
SAT 22:00 Sabotage (b05n7rfw)
Series 2
Episode 2
Developed by the team behind the live comedy night of the same name, Sabotage prides itself on being a comedy show for comedy fans; a unique event where the acts love coming to perform, and the fans seek out something special.
MC Mark Talbot introduces:
Ivo Graham
Colin Hoult
Mae Martin
Sheeps
Dan Clark
Made for BBC Radio 4 Extra by Hat Trick Productions.
SAT 23:00 Goodness Gracious Me (b007jv2l)
Series 1
Episode 2
Indian students on a gap year enjoy bustling England's smells at the airport, the Indian Neighbours are cooking a roast and Skipinder the Punjabi Kangaroo hops in.
Stars Sanjeev Bhaskar, Kulvinder Ghir, Nitin Sawhney, Meera Syal and Nina Wadia.
Gold Winner of the Sony Radio Academy Awards. The sketch comedy show originally ran on BBC Radio 4 from 1996 to 1998, later transferring to TV on BBC Two from 1998 to 2001.
Scripted by Sharat Sardana, Richard Pinto and the cast.
Produced by Gareth Edwards and Anil Gupta.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in July 1996.
SAT 23:25 The Comedy Club Interviews (b05p6v04)
From 10pm to midnight, seven days a week, the Comedy Club has two hours of comedy. Plus Arthur Smith chats to Matt Rees.
SAT 23:30 Wondermentalist Cabaret (b00y2f1f)
Series 1
Episode 1
Poet, performer, enemy of all that's difficult and upsetting, Matt Harvey brings his own comedy-infused, musically-enhanced, slightly interactive poetry cabaret to the airwaves.
Recorded in front of an audience in Bristol, he's joined by Elvis McGonagall and one man house band Jerri Hart.
Fellow poets Lucy English and Byron Vincent battle it out with Elvis in a Dead Poets' Slam, while the audience compose their own poem on the subject of Sundays.
Producer: Mark Smalley
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in February 2011.