TODAY’S RADIO

Man At The Helm

11.30AM, RADIO 4 Fearing that her young, glamorous, divorced mother is going adrift, nine-year-old Lizzie draws up a list of eligible bachelors, and sets about getting ‘a man at the helm’ for their chaotic household. This four-part adaptation of Nina Stibbe’s comic novel starts today.

The Folk Show With Mark Radcliffe

7PM, RADIO 2 Seth Lakeman performs a studio session of songs from his fine blues-influenced album Ballads Of The Broken Few. Seth is joined tonight – and on the record – by Emillie, Beth and Meghann, who make up the trio Wildwood Kin. The harmonies are superb and the songs, some new and some reworked folk standards, have an eerie insistence.

The Full Works Concert

8PM, CLASSIC FM A largely self-taught pianist, Lucas

Seth Lakeman (7pm, Radio 2)

Debargue didn’t embark on his musical career until he was 20, yet is winning an international reputation for the quality of his playing. Jane Jones features his new recording of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 7 in tonight’s programme.

Three Score And Ten

9.55PM, RADIO 3 Broadcast to mark 70 years of poetry on Radio 3, this rare archive recording features Dylan Thomas reading his poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, in which he urges his father to ‘rage against the dying of the light’.

Little Lifetimes

11PM, RADIO 4 Penny has worked in the same solicitors’ office since she left school, and has always liked the dark panelling and quietly respectable air of the firm. Now, the premises have been updated, and Penny feels out of place; she also suspects her current boss is having an affair. Penny decides to take action and right a few wrongs in Jenny Eclair’s somewhat obvious short story, read by Imelda Staunton.

Bird Island

11.15PM, RADIO 4 Reece Shearsmith, Julian RhindTutt and Katy Wix star in the final episode of this bizarrely funny comedy drama, set in a sub-Antarctic research station.