Kate Chisholm

It’s a topsy-turvy world at the moment, with New Labour tearing each other apart like Old Tories, and brothers Will and Ed transmogrifying into each other on The Archers. Even Radios Two and Four have been caught up in this changing-character business, with programmes you’d normally expect to find on Four’s schedule popping up on Radio Two, and vice versa. On Saturday morning I thought I must have pushed the wrong button by mistake when I heard Leonard Cohen girning away at ‘So long, Marianne’ on what I thought was Radio Four but then began to think must be 88 to 91 degrees FM. But no, as I continued to listen I realised it was definitely Four. No mistake. The quality of the production (by Alan Hall) gave the game away.

Early mornings on Four have seen a miraculous appearance in the past fortnight with the emergence of the Evan and Nick Show. Not for years has there been a genuine double act on the Today programme; not since Brian Redhead and John Timpson in the 1980s when the Queen tuned in at ten past seven to hear the cross-talk between the genial, emollient Timpson and his combative northern partner, Redhead. Along the way they were joined at different times by Libby Purves and Sue MacGregor, but the programme’s character was defined by Redhead and Timpson’s repartee. (I guess it’s a sign of those different times that they were never thought of as Brian and John.) As Sue MacGregor once remarked, they were like ‘a marriage on air’.

The Proms (BBC Radio 3); Latitude Festival (BBC Radio 4); A tribute to Charles Wheeler (BBC Radio 4) It was totally over-the-top, the first-night concert of this year’s Proms season, the 114th since Henry Wood set out in 1895 to educate the musical palate of the nation. It was almost as if the programme was designed by the new Proms director, Roger Wright, to confound the critics with its weird retrievals from the musical archives and mélange of titbits from Messiaen and Elliott Carter, composers who are to be specially featured this season. But it was wonderfully, gloriously celebratory, and also entirely in keeping with the Victorian roots and setting of this Summer-Festival-To-Beat-All-Festivals.

I guess it’s no surprise that, while the rest of us were twiddling the dials on our cheap plastic transistors (made in Japan) to find Radio Caroline, the future Archbishop of Canterbury as a teenager in the Sixties was tuning in to Radio Three. He was hoping to hear the first blast of the latest Benjamin Britten, live not from Glastonbury but from the Aldeburgh Festival. Dr Rowan Williams was talking to Michael Berkeley on this week’s Private Passions (Sunday), Radio Three’s antidote to celebrity chitchat. As if to prove that the Sixties were not all about the Beatles and Bob Dylan, Williams told us that he shut himself in his bedroom to hear the première of Britten’s cantata, The Burning Fiery Furnace.

Two men, a single piece of music and a script that’s barely 40 minutes long. And yet when it was over I felt quite stunned; shaken and unnerved by a totally unexpected dramatic twist. I’d been so absorbed, thinking in my own clever way that I knew what was going to happen, that I understood what I was meant to think about the characters and what they were up to. But then, suddenly, all those expectations were blown apart. Address Unknown, adapted by Tim Dee from the book by Kressmann Taylor, was one of the most effective afternoon plays I’ve heard in a long time.

The light pollution at Chequers can’t be that bad in semi-rural Bucks, so perhaps someone should suggest to our troubled PM that next time he has a weekend off he should take a look upwards to the night sky. It might help him to realise that the petty squabbles and ambitious pretensions of his Cabinet colleagues are as nothing in the big scheme of things. Or perhaps he should tune in every weekday afternoon to Cosmic Quest, the latest long-running documentary series on Radio Four. For six weeks, Heather Couper will be leading us on a journey through the history of our knowledge of the universe, from the earliest-known attempts of the Babylonians to catalogue the stars to the most recent odyssey to Mars.

You can almost hear the whispering through the ether. A whole weekend devoted to Chopin? Whatever was Roger Wright, Radio Three’s controller, thinking of? The Polish-born composer was only 39 when he died of TB in 1849. And he only ever really wrote for the piano. Surely there’s not enough music to fill 24 hours, let alone 48. His Preludes, Etudes, Barcarolles and Mazurkas are performed by every aspiring concert pianist, and rehashed for any promotion that demands a slushy, sentimental underscore. Do we really need a Radio Three Chopin Experience? But Wright’s on a mission. His station is evolving away from a more rigid kind of scheduling to a broader blend of musical genres with some stunningly effective speech radio.

While the TV chiefs squirm with embarrassment, exposed for misleading the public in the phone-voting scandals, radio has had a brilliant week. Not just an announcement that 34.22 million listeners have been listening each week to BBC radio (let alone all the commercial radio stations, digital and online) but also endorsements from two people not normally mentioned in the same breath. Pete Doherty, the badly behaved rock star, told reporters on leaving Wormwood Scrubs that he’d spent the last few weeks with ‘a lot of gangsters and Radio Four’. Radio Four? Not Radio One? Or BBC6? What a coup for Mark Damazer, Four’s Controller (and his station’s just won Gold at the Sony Awards, radio’s Oscars).

It was a daringly original thing to do. To write a play where the heroine stays silent for most of the time. And the drama’s creator, Anthony Minghella, cleverly conceals her reason for doing so until the very last sentence. I can remember listening to Cigarettes and Chocolate when it was first broadcast back in 1988. It sounded so different, so strange, and still does after almost 20 years. Radio Four repeated it on Saturday afternoon as part of a short season (shared with Radio Three) to celebrate the work of Minghella, who died in March aged just 54. The play (starring a very youthful-sounding Bill Nighy and Juliet Stevenson) begins with everyone leaving messages on Gemma’s answerphone in the hope that at some point she will pick up the receiver and talk to them.

‘Could you account for everything that surrounds you in the course of a single second?’ asks one of the characters in Peter Ackroyd’s first play for radio, Chatterton: The Allington Solution (Thursday). ‘All the intentions, the wishes, motives, perceptions, judgments that swirl around any one of us.’ It’s a provocative question. And especially now in 2008 that we are bombarded by information, tempting diversions and constant external hubbub. How can we tune in to what we are thinking and make sense of our own reactions, thoughts and feelings, let alone take note of the bigger picture around us?

Something so weird has happened to the way we live now that Radio Two has decided it needs to dedicate a week’s programming to Let’s Talk About Sex. It’s designed, says the billing in Radio Times, ‘to encourage parents to speak more freely to their children about sex and relationships’. But there’s already so much ‘talk’ about sex on film, on TV, in the adverts, do we really need any more? And in any case what teenager with any sense of rightful pride would welcome a ‘conversation’ with The Parent about it?

You might think that the revival of the 1950s radio classic Journey into Space was a desperate move by Radio Four to cash in on the success of the new Dr Who. Even the title sounds incredibly dated. Who now cares about space? But when the serial first hit the airwaves via the Light Programme, millions were immediately drawn in to the adventures of Captain Jet Morgan and his ‘stratoship’, and it became compulsive listening, not just in the UK. Journey into Space tapped into something, a feeling, a spirit, a quest, which sent its vibrations around the world (the programme was translated into 17 languages). Space exploration was then believed to be the Great Hope for mankind after the devastation of two world wars.

The relentless downgrading of the News to a series of shocking revelations about child abuse, bearded terrorists and the ghastly incompetence of our Olympic pretensions sent me straight to the World Service where even the shortest of hourly bulletins contains enough information to remind us that life goes on beyond our own limited horizons. On Sundays, too, there’s a new evening series presented by the illustrious Bridget Kendall. In The Forum she brings together an unusual selection of guests from around the world to ‘navigate’, as she explained, ‘the cross-current of ideas’.

Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings National Portrait Gallery, until 15 June It’s refreshing to discover from a new and beautifully judged exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery that there was a time when women were in charge — successful, assertive, and at ease with their sexuality. Brilliant Women celebrates the Bluestocking women of the early 18th century, who spurned the customary role of gentlewomen as mere decorative adornment and took on the mantle of learning.

It all began with a short story by Peter Ackroyd, telling of an extraordinary visitation by the Virgin Mary that was promised to occur sometime soon at St Mildred’s Church in Bread Street in the heart of London. Her reappearance would signify a great outpouring of religious fervour. Pilgrims from across the land would converge on the capital in the hope of seeing the Virgin, touching the hem of her garment and receiving her blessing. Virgin Day was born. And so was the idea of ‘A Film for Radio’.