RADIO CHOICE

BACK in the Middle Ages, you didn’t need a passport to get into a port. Travellers, traders and sailors expected to be able to dock and stay there, unhindered by bureaucracy. If they wanted to venture beyond the port, they needed some kind of documentation or signed letter of transit. Tim Harford looks at the evolution of the passport in the penultimate instalment of his 50 THINGS THAT MADE THE MODERN ECONOMY (RADIO 4, (FM), 12.04PM).

PHYLLIDA LAW and one of her two thespian daughters, Sophie Thompson (pictured), star in the comedy drama LOST IN FRANCE

(RADIO 4, 2.15PM (FM), by Alice Burden and Harriet Collings. A career girl quits her job to make a fresh start. She leaves her boyfriend and her home — and heads to the Dordogne. The pace of life is very different in

‘la France profonde’, but it is not entirely trouble-free . . .

ON A February Sunday in 1682, three men shot Thomas Thynne dead in Pall Mall. Thynne, whose young and unwilling wife had bolted to Holland, was mired in intrigue. Tom Charlton presents THE ESSAY: A TALE OF RESTORATION MURDER (RADIO 3, 10.45PM), telling the story of the aristocrat who inspired the mock epitaph: ‘Here lies Tom Thynne of Longleat Hall/Who ne’er would have miscarried/Had he married the woman he slept withal/Or slept with the woman he married.’