Radio choice Pete Naughton

The Conversation WORLD SERVICE, 11.30AM

 Casting directors – the people who decide which actors are put up for which roles – are among the most influential, and least publicly well-known, people in the entertainment industry. They’re also almost always women. Today’s programme pairs a star of the Englishlanguage side of the business, Nina Gold – whose CV includes Game of Thrones, the new Star Wars films and The Theory of Everything – with the top Bollywood casting director Nandini Shrikent. They discuss the challenges, and the pleasures, of their work.

The Essay: Stories That Sing RADIO 3, 10.45PM

 Opera is this week’s theme on The Essay; but before you yawn and resolve to listen to Book at Bedtime instead, try tonight’s opening instalment by the novelist Julian Barnes. For most of his life, he’d thought of opera as banal, incomprehensible and discouragingly elitist; but, following a terrible bereavement in 2008, he found himself drawn to the medium – and is now a persuasively ardent convert. And being Barnes, the writing is near perfect, peppered with enviably beautiful sentences.