TODAY’S RADIO

KEN BRUCE 9.30AM, RADIO 2

★★★★

A week’s worth of live music from the Radio 2 Piano Room ends with Ed Sheeran, along with the BBC Concert Orchestra, at the Maida Vale studio. This space was once a roller skating rink, but was changed in the 1930s to a recording and broadcasting complex. The acoustics in this quirky, much adapted and modified building are bright and lively, as you can hear this morning when Ed sings a classic, a cover and a new song.

AFTERNOON CONCERT 2PM, RADIO 3

★★★

John Williams’s Fanfare for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games sounds, as you might expect, like a theme from an epic film. A recording of the fanfare by the

Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by the composer himself, opens this programme of recorded concerts from around Europe.

THE ART AND SCIENCE OF BLENDING 2.45PM, RADIO 4

★★★ Surprisingly, given the wine’s pale golden colour, some varieties of black grapes are permissible in the making of champagne, with each variety adding its own flavour. In his continuing series on the art of blending, Barry Smith has given himself the agreeable assignment of finding out how champagnes acquire their flavour, and how war, fashion, frost and disease have affected the taste of champagne over the years.

CROWDSCIENCE

8.30PM, WORLD SERVICE ★★★ Does photographic memory exist? While most of us can broadly remember important events in our lives, we often forget the finer details; however, there are some people with perfect recall. Here, Marnie Chesterton investigates what is happening inside our brains when we use our memories. SJ

Ed Sheeran (9.30am, Radio 2)