TODAY’S RADIO

Ken Bruce

9.30AM, RADIO 2 Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top begins his week’s selection of Tracks Of My Years with music from the Rolling Stones and George Jones.

Natural History Heroes

9.30AM, RADIO 4 Alfred Russel Wallace was born to poor parents, and lived in poverty for most of his life. He and Charles Darwin came up, separately and simultaneously, with their ideas on the origin of species, but Wallace is often forgotten and his work ignored. In this programme, the entomologist George Beccaloni gives Wallace his due praise.

A Tale Of Two Cities

11.15AM, RADIO 4 EXTRA A king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face reign in England, while across the Channel, a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face reign in France. It is the best of times, and it is the worst of times. Charles Dickens’s classic novel, which begins during the run-up to the French Revolution, is on each morning this week in an adaptation that stars Robert Lindsay, Jonathan Coy, Karl Johnson and Lydia Wilson.

Radcliffe & Maconie

1PM, BBC 6 MUSIC The writer Amy Liptrot grew up on the beautiful islands of Orkney, but her childhood, due to her father’s bouts of mania, was far from idyllic. Amy left Orkney for Hackney, where she took to drink, drugs and a dangerously unstable way of life. She managed to drag herself back to Orkney, where she fought her addictions, and immersed herself in the wild dramatic beauty of this Scottish archipelago. Amy talks about her experiences here.

The Full Works Concert

8PM, CLASSIC FM It’s National Video Games Day and, to mark the event, Jane Jones will feature classical music used in video games, plus scores by Nobuo Uematsu, who is considered – not without reason – to be the Beethoven of the games world.

Jools Holland

11PM, RADIO 2 Micky Dolenz of The Monkees joins Jools for this first programme in a returning series; he’ll play favourite tracks and sing a live session with Jools and the band.

Micky Dolenz (11pm, Radio 2)