Today’s radio

CHANGING WORLD, CHANGING BODIES

1.30PM, 11.05PM, WORLD SERVICE HHH The Dutch just keep on growing. They are already the tallest people in Europe, but, while average heights in the UK have plateaued, over in the Low Countries, they are aiming high. In the second of his series about the way modern life is affecting our faces and bodies, Vybarr Cregan-reid looks at some extraordinary findings behind these differences, and hears that a state of mind, rather than just nutrition and genes, appears to affect a nation’s average height.

THE CALIFORNIAN CENTURY

1.45PM, RADIO 4 HHH

Shots ring out. A man falls to the floor. An elegantly dressed woman tries to stop the blood, but the man is already dead. Stanley

Amy Molloy (2.15pm, Radio 4) Tucci explains how a double assassination in 1978 led Dianne Feinstein, who had wanted to get out of politics, to becoming a reluctant mayor of San Francisco. It was said of Dianne, who is on course to be the longest-serving female Senator in US history, that she didn’t mind what people did in bed, as long as they were in bed by 11pm – an attitude that’s defined her continuing political career.

TWO HOUSEHOLDS

2.15PM, RADIO 4 HHH

On the night before a wedding, a grim and terrible discovery is made. The bride and groom come from farming families in Northern Ireland. There have been bitter divisions between the clans, but they have been healed; then, the past is, literally, dug up. Amy Molloy stars in this powerful drama based on Claire Mcgowan’s crime thriller.

RADIO 3 IN CONCERT

7.30PM, RADIO 3 HHHH Beethoven’s uplifting Missa Solemnis, which the composer felt was a sense of the divine expressed in music, is performed tonight by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. SJ