RADIO CHOICE

HAVING been held up at gunpoint and been on the receiving end of unprovoked hostility, the small and wiry Thomas Page McBee (pictured) signed up for a boxing gym and trained for a big fight at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. What makes Thomas’s story extraordinary is the fact that, on his original birth certificate, he was registered as a girl. In a week-long reading from his acclaimed memoir AMATEUR (RADIO 4, 9.45AM (FM), 12.30AM), we hear how Thomas struggled with the image of masculinity that men are expected to project, and found genuine companionship in the world of boxing.

GILLIAN ANDERSON plays the Broadway star Margo Channing, with Lily James as the scheming Eve, in the stage version of the film All About Eve. The

singer-songwriter P.J. Harvey has written the music for the show, weaving musical elements from the film into her score. In BEHIND THE SCENES (RADIO 4, 4PM), she takes John Wilson through some of the various stages — creative and technical — of writing music for the West End stage.

n SARAH CHURCHWELL presents the week-long series THE ESSAY: FIVE SCREEN GODS (RADIO 3, 10.45PM), a look at the lives and the charms of cinema’s leading men from the Thirties and Forties. She begins with the ‘king of Hollywood’, Clark Gable.