THIS WEEK’S RADIO PICKS

SUNDAY

PRIVATE PASSIONS: HELEN MACDONALD RADIO 3, 12PM

The author of the 2014 bestseller H Is For Hawk reveals her favourite music, which unsurprisingly has a bird theme: Stravinsky’s The Firebird, for example. Macdonald also talks about writing about nature to hold the world to account.

DAVE PODMORE’S POSITIVE TEST RADIO 4, 7.15PM

The latest comic outing for cricket’s fictional anti-hero Dave Podmore, former ‘sledging coach’ to the Australian Ashes team. Here, he spies a chance to cash in on Covid-19 and its effect on the Tokyo Olympics. Actors who play giant mascots also feature in his plans.

MONDAY

SIX SUSPECTS RADIO 4, 7.45PM

Ten-part Indian whodunnit by diplomat Vikas Swarup, whose novel Q&A became the film Slumdog Millionaire. When the playboy son of an Indian politician is murdered while lavishly celebrating his acquittal for murder, police gather six suspects, all with a gun and a motive.

TUESDAY

THE DOCUMENTARY: GRANDMA BENCHES OF ZIMBABWE

BBC WORLD SERVICE, 3.05PM

The story of how grandmothers were used as lay health workers to combat mental health problems in Zimbabwe. The idea of using a Friendship Bench to sit and talk proved more successful than conventional treatment and it is now spreading around the world.

WEDNESDAY

WOMEN TALKING ABOUT CARS RADIO 4, 6.30PM

Famous women talk about the cars they have owned, the trips they’ve made and what they keep in the boot for emergencies. In the first of four episodes, Victoria Coren Mitchell interviews Dawn French (below), who names the comedian who ruined her beloved Ford Cortina, and extols the virtues of the refrigerated glove box.

FRIDAY

GUILTY MEN RADIO 4, 11AM

In 1940, after Dunkirk, an anonymous book caused uproar by attacking the government’s ‘guilty men’ over their lack of preparation for war and the effect of this and 1930s austerity on ordinary people. Phil Tinline explores the publication in the context of Brexit and coronavirus, and the problems of naming and shaming.

SATURDAY

NEW MUSIC SHOW RADIO 3, 10PM

Performance of Philip Glass’s Music In Eight Parts, which was lost in 1970, rediscovered in

Christie’s, New

York three years ago and recorded in lockdown in April. The

Philip Glass

Ensemble’s musical director,

Michael

Riesman, talks about the process.