TODAY’S RADIO

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE AUSTEN? 11.30AM, RADIO 4

Last week, we heard the original pilot of this comedy drama about two warring sisters, one a novelist and one an actress, played by Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. It went down well in some quarters, and has been turned into a five-part series that starts today. In this opening episode, the sisters turn the Hay Book Festival into a battleground.

DEAD HAND 2.15PM, RADIO 4

It’s worth catching up with this five-part thriller set in modernday Northern Ireland, even if you missed last week’s opening episode. Paul Mallon and Roisin Gallagher are among the cast for this drama about a serial killer who,

after 20 years of inactivity, appears to be back on the hunt for victims. In the second episode, it seems that the police have a suspect.

THE CLASSIC FM CONCERT 8PM, CLASSIC FM

John Williams, that maestro of film music, stepped on to the rostrum earlier this year – before his 90th birthday – to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance of his music for the hit film E.T. John Suchet opens the bill with a recording of that concert, and closes with a performance of Sibelius’s Second Symphony, conducted by the 25-year-old Klaus Makela.

WITNESS

11.45PM, RADIO 4

The Battle of Mount Longdon during the Falklands War left 18 British soldiers dead, two of them under 18. Thirty-one Argentinian soldiers, many of them young conscripts, also died. We hear from Miguel Savage, a 19-yearold conscript who had no desire to ever be a soldier, and from Quintin Wright, a trained British volunteer, about one of the decisive encounters of this war.

SJ

Jennifer Saunders (11.30am, R4)