RADIO CHOICE

IF YOU want some really useful advice about life’s problems, go to someone who has messed things up, admitted it, then got back on track. Jo Brand (pictured) — as we hear throughout this week in BORN LIPPY (RADIO 4, 9.45AM (FM), 12.30AM) — is such a person. She was a good child, but the hormones kicked in, a bad boy came courting, Jo left home and her life took a few wrong turns. Now, with hard-won wisdom, she shares insights into family life — just in time for those tricky Christmas gatherings.

ON A bitterly cold December day in 1840, Napoleon’s mortal remains were paraded through the streets of Paris before vast crowds ahead of reburial in the Hotel des Invalides. While he was being entombed, 14 men were living in confinement in

the Bicetre Asylum, each one convinced that he was Napoleon. In the first of a ten-part series exploring A HISTORY OF DELUSIONS (RADIO 4, 1.45PM), Daniel Freeman looks at the facts and the fiction of the Napoleon obsession.

THE music journalist David Hepworth, apart from a brief period as a street cleaner, has spent his working life in the music business. He shares his drily funny memories of LP records all this week in an entertaining series of THE ESSAY: THE LOST WORLD OF THE LP (RADIO 3, 10.45PM).