... AND YOUR RADIOPICKS

MONDAY BLOODY EISTEDDFOD

RADIO 4, MON-FRI, 10.45AM & 7.45PM

Culture and crime collide in this five-part adaptation of Myfanwy Alexander’s best-selling satirical novel and whodunnit about contemporary life in rural mid-Wales. Expect songs, poetry, druids and a murder as Inspector Daf Dafis investigates.

TUESDAY IN THE STUDIO: MIRA NAIR WORLD SERVICE, 11.30AM

The director behind the BBC’s current Sunday-night blockbuster A Suitable Boy – as well as films Salaam Bombay! and Monsoon Wedding – was interviewed about her career on location while filming the new adaptation of Vikram Seth’s novel in central India. It was, she says, the series she was born to make.

GREAT LIVES RADIO 4, 4.30PM

A reassessment of Benito Mussolini (right), the wartime leader and founder of the fascist movement in Italy. The discussion is led by Professor Margaret MacMillan, who argues that he was not the buffoon often portrayed, nor a hero but a brilliant propagandist. Future episodes include Frida Kahlo, Donna Summer and Kenneth Williams.

THURSDAY DRAMA: GRAVEYARDS IN MY CLOSET

RADIO 4, 2.15PM

A follow-up to My Mother Taught Me How To Sing, Daf James’s play is an investigation of a family secret involving his grandmother in 1931 and how it reverberated across the centuries. With the help of actors and his dad, he tries to dig up the skeletons in the family closet.

FRIDAY BBC PROMS 2020 RADIO 3, 7.30PM

In this 2014 Prom Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic perform an all-Russian programme comprising Rachmaninov’s final – and thought by some to be his finest – orchestral work, Symphonic Dances, and Stravinsky’s The Firebird, which provided the score for Diaghilev’s fairytale ballet.

COMEDY CLUB: RADIO FIVE RADIO 4 EXTRA, 10.30PM

One of Monty Python star Eric Idle’s earliest solo projects in 1973-4 was this quirky and iconoclastic radio show. This first episode includes Pieces Of Wood And How To Make Them, a new panel game, Absolute Rubbish, and a satirical attack on apartheid in Rhodesia and its British

supporters.

SATURDAY FATHERLAND RADIO 4 EXTRA, 1PM

Adaptation in consecutive parts of Robert Harris’s best-selling

1992 detective novel set in a world where Nazi Germany won the Second World War and the perpetrator of a murder ends up pursuing the man investigating the crime.