The BBC has announced that it has a sustainable plan for the future of the BBC Singers, in association with The VOCES8 Foundation.
The threat to reduce the staff of the three English orchestras by 20% has not been lifted, but it is being reconsidered.
See the BBC press release here.

Radio-Lists Home Now on R4 Contact

RADIO-LISTS: BBC RADIO 4
Unofficial Weekly Listings for BBC Radio 4 — supported by bbc.co.uk/programmes/



SATURDAY 20 AUGUST 2016

SAT 00:00 Midnight News (b07nn8vw)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.

SAT 00:30 Book of the Week (b07nrzj4)
Upbeat, Episode 5

'The great adventure of the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq deserves not only to be recorded for posterity but also to serve as an example of how the essential can survive catastrophe.' - Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.

Musician and conductor Paul MacAlindin was eating fish and chips in an Edinburgh cafe in 2008 when he first read the story in the Herald newspaper - "Iraqi teen seeks Maestro". That Iraqi teen was the astonishing Zuhal Sultan, a pianist who dreamed up the idea of a National Youth Orchestra of Iraq aged only 17.

Paul was intrigued.

Barely out of war, with no discernible orchestral tradition that he knew of, what could there be to work with? What instruments did they even have? How could it be that we in the West had heard so much about war and bloodshed in Iraq, but knew so little of who the Iraqis really were?

Fixated on the article, fish trembling at the end of his fork, Paul simply said to himself, "I know how to do this."

The following year, after auditions via Skype, a promise of a bespoke piece from the late Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, favours called in, massive logistical complexities and financial hiccups, they ran their first summer school. And so the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq was born.

In a few short years this group of young musicians came through the most difficult and dangerous times to produce fine music, not only in Iraq

Read by Kenny Blyth
Written by Paul MacAlindin
Directed and Abridged by Polly Coles

Produced by Clive Brill
A Brill production for BBC Radio 4.

SAT 00:48 Shipping Forecast (b07nn8vy)
The latest shipping forecast.

SAT 01:00 Selection of BBC World Service Programmes (b07nn8w0)
BBC Radio 4 joins the BBC World Service. BBC Radio 4 resumes at 5.20am.

SAT 05:20 Shipping Forecast (b07nn8w2)
The latest shipping forecast.

SAT 05:30 News Briefing (b07nn8w4)
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.

SAT 05:43 Prayer for the Day (b07ns40w)
A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Shaunaka Rishi Das, Director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.

SAT 05:45 iPM (b07ns43m)
How a wife's heart attack returned her husband to World War Two. iPM listener and clinical psychologist Janie Penn-Barwell remembers the fear, guilt and sadness her patients carried with them for decades. And Mishal Husain reads the bulletin about our listeners, Your News. Presented by Eddie Mair. iPM@bbc.co.uk.

SAT 06:00 News and Papers (b07nn8w6)
The latest news headlines. Including a look at the papers.

SAT 06:04 Weather (b07nn8w8)
The latest weather forecast.

SAT 06:07 Open Country (b07nrxdg)
Spurn Point Lifeboat Station

Helen Mark spends the day with the only full-time lifeboat crew in the UK, based on Spurn Point. This unique landscape is a strip of land, 3.5 miles long and only 50m wide in places. Until recently the station was occupied by the station staff and their families, but the fragility of the Spurn Point sandbank that links it to the mainland means it is no longer fit for so many people. And if you want to visit, you have to park up and walk 3 miles, since the storms of 2013 washed parts of the road away.

The lifeboat stations covers the treacherous inshore waters of the Humber and 100 miles out to sea, as far north as Bridlington and south to Skegness. There's an average call out rate of once a week, but the crew have to be ready 24/7. Helen meets Ben Mitchell, the 29 year old 2nd Coxwain who is in charge this week, plus crew members Ed Kilsby, Liam Dunnett, Glen Peterson and Kim Platford. She also visits the manager of the Spurn Poin National Nature Reserve, who explains why this tiny strip of land is of national importance to wildlife.

Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery.

SAT 06:30 Farming Today (b07nn8wb)
Farming Today This Week: Farmers on Tour

An international group of farmers travel through Africa exploring different types of agriculture, from hand-milking cows in Kenya to growing vegetables in the townships of South Africa. They are Nuffield Farming Scholars from Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, Ireland and the UK, and their businesses range from cattle ranching to dairy farming, crab fishing to free range egg production. The team are sponsored by their home countries to take a break from the farm, travel the world and learn lessons that will benefit the global agricultural community. What the scholars find in sub-Saharan Africa is a world away from how things are done back home in the West; which raises one important question - does the world feed Africa or can Africa feed the world? Produced and presented by UK Nuffield Scholar Anna Jones.

SAT 06:57 Weather (b07nn8wd)
The latest weather forecast.

SAT 07:00 Today (b07pd34c)
News and current affairs. Including Sports Desk, Weather and Thought for the Day.

SAT 09:00 Saturday Live (b07nn8wg)
Miles Jupp

Miles Jupp joins the Rev Richard Coles and Aasmah Mir and shares his love of cricket, rollercoasters and why he is possibly the poshest stand-up comedian on the circuit.

Lance Corporal Richard Jones from the Household Cavalry reveals how he combines being a magician alongside his military career.

Plus a trio of extreme sports enthusiasts: Blake Aldridge on why he left the world of Olympic diving to become a cliff diver, Emily Guilding explains the appeal of wing walking and why she performs headstands strapped to the wings of a plane and Saturday Live listener Romy Shovelton who races camels in her spare time.

Plus the Inheritance Tracks of the former head of the army Lord Richard Dannatt.

Miles Jupp's stand-up tour Songs Of Freedom starts on September 7th at the Stables in Milton Keynes, and continues around the UK finishing in February 2017.
Richard Jones is starring in the Impossible magic show, at the Noel Coward Theatre in London until the 27th August.
Blake Aldridge can next be seen diving in the UK at Blue Lagoon in Pembrokeshire, Wales, on the 11th September.

Produced by Claire Bartleet and Steven Williams
Editor: Beverley Purcell.

SAT 10:30 In Defence of the Mid-Life Crisis (b07pd34f)
Stephen Smith, best known as Newsnight's culture correspondent, takes a wry look at the mid-life crisis.

Far from being something we might feel embarrassed or ashamed, isn't mid-life actually the perfect time to learn new skills, instruments or just an opportunity to re-invent yourself? Isn't it time we defended the Mid-Life Crisis?

In the programme, Stephen hears from scholars of Schopenhauer to Sting, well, his accompanist, Jason Rebello, as he takes a field trip into the un-chartered waters of the Mid-Life Crisis, once considered just a heart-beat away from old age. He visits Brighton, considered by many to be the UK's capital of the mid-life crisis, to talk to those who've come out the other side. They now say they now lead happier and more fulfilled lives. How did they do it? He checks into a top Harley Street clinic, where the faces of the stars are lifted and tummies tucked, but what treatment will they do to him?

And if you thought the old MLC was just the preserve of heterosexual middle aged men, think again, as psychotherapist Philippa Perry, journalist and author Miranda Sawyer and writer Simon Fanshawe, describe.

Perhaps, after all, life is one big crisis, as veteran socialite Nicky Haslam suggests.

Producer: Jim Frank

(Photo: Steve and Nicky Haslam).

SAT 11:00 The Forum (b07pd34h)
Grass Roots: The Impact and Influence of 'People's' Movements

How have grass movements have evolved and how are they responding to a world where there is increased democracy but increased challenge too. Looking at a shack dwellers movement in South Africa, rights organisations in Latin America and the Maker Movement in the United States, Bridget Kendall and guests explore how grass roots groups are working today and how they may develop in the future with S'bu Zikode, Professor Joe Foweraker and Gene Sherman.

Photo: Grass Roots (credit: Shan Pillay).

SAT 11:30 From Our Own Correspondent (b07nn8wj)
Reports from writers and journalists around the world. Presented by Kate Adie.

SAT 12:00 News Summary (b07nn8wl)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.

SAT 12:04 Your Money and Your Life (b07pd34k)
Sixties and Beyond

In a four-part series, Louise Cooper considers the financial and emotional dimensions to the most important decisions we make in our lives.

Life expectancy at birth and at age 65 has been increasing steadily for the past four decades.

This demographic success story brings its dilemmas for today's retirees: how to plan for a retirement that could easily last 20 years, and how to find enough money for expensive care fees.

Louise talks to some of today's over-60s about the pressures and uncertainties of planning for retirement.

Presenter:Louise Cooper
Producer: Ruth Alexander
Editor:Andrew Smith.

SAT 12:30 The Museum of Curiosity (b07ns0r2)
Series 9, Reeves, Wyatt, Williams

This week, the Professor of Ignorance John Lloyd and his curator Noel Fielding welcome:

Vic Reeves, the comedian, artist and game show host whose credits include Vic Reeves Big Night Out; The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer; Bang, Bang, It's Reeves and Mortimer, Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased); Catterick; House of Fools; and Shooting Stars. Vic also is the author of Vic Reeve's Vast Book of World Knowledge and presented Vic Reeves' Pirates - a six-part documentary on West Country pirates.

Dr Tristram Wyatt, Senior Research Associate and Emeritus Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford whose main areas of interest are the evolution of pheromones and animal behaviour.
His TEDx talk on the 'Smelly Mystery of Human Pheromones' has had over a million views and the transcripts have been translated into 24 languages.

Professor Kate Williams, who co-presented BBC Two's Restoration Home, presented Young Victoria for BBC Two commentated for the State Opening of Parliament, the Diamond Jubilee and the Royal Wedding as well as covering the Olympic Opening Ceremony for BBC News. She was the resident historian on Radio 4's The Rest is History with Frank Skinner and is a regular guest panellist on BBC Two's Insert Name Here.

This week, the Museum's Guest Committee appreciate a pale bird that fakes injury to protect its young; a childishly photoshopped picture that fooled Conan Doyle; and a faint smell that may or may not exist, but (if it did) might drive you wild.

The show was researched by Mike Turner and Anne Miller of QI.

The producers were Richard Turner and James Harkin.

It was a BBC Studios Production.

SAT 12:57 Weather (b07nn8wn)
The latest weather forecast.

SAT 13:00 News (b07nn8wq)
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.

SAT 13:10 Any Questions? (b07ns0r6)
James Brokenshire MP, Iain Dale, Lindsey German, Chuka Umunna MP

Shaun Ley presents political debate and discussion from the Radio Theatre at BBC Broadcasting House in London with the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland James Brokenshire MP, the political commentator Iain Dale, Convenor of Stop the War Lindsey German and the Labour MP Chuka Umunna.

SAT 14:00 Any Answers? (b07nn8ws)
Any Answers after the Saturday broadcast of Any Questions? Lines open at 1230. Presented by Sheila McClennon.
Call 03700 100 444. Email any.answers@bbc.co.uk. Tweet,#BBCAQ. Follow us @bbcanyquestions.

SAT 14:30 Drama (b07p0kv5)
The Clintons, The Man Scale

Three entertaining new dramas imagine key moments in the Clintons' personal and political lives together, closely based on the published accounts and opinions of those who've witnessed their enduring partnership.

2008, and Hillary Clinton is running for the Democratic Presidential Nomination. A long-heralded, well-organised and well-funded candidate, the figures are all going her way, until a charismatic young Senator from Illinois starts to attract attention. And as the race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton goes down to the wire, is Bill's role in her campaign becoming a problem?

Hillary's decision to fight on, or withdraw, is somehow being weighed in 'The Man Scale'...

Produced and directed by Jonquil Panting.

SAT 15:15 A Guide to Coastal Wildlife (b074zy93)
Mudflats and Salt Marshes

What attracts so many birds to gather on vast expanses of coastal sea mud around the coast? Well, the answer can be found in this programme when Brett Westwood joins naturalist Phil Gates on the Northumberland coast and after wading carefully across a slippery bed of popping seaweed, they explore the sticky ooze of the mud flats, to discover it teeming with life; food for wading birds. As well as cockles and lugworms, there are much smaller mud snails and mud shrimps. The latter are tiny crustaceans, very elongated with enormous antennae like "curved crane jibs" which are found in vast numbers (a conservative estimate is 10,000 per square metre) swimming on the surface in liquid mud or hiding out in tunnels below the surface. This rich source of food explains why so many birds gather here to feed; birds like the smart looking shelduck; a duck which is almost the size of small goose but lays its eggs in underground burrows! Away from the mud, slightly higher up the shore on the salt marsh, Brett and Phil discover sea lavender, a plant which has a clever way of dealing with high salt levels by excreting salt crystals onto its leaves giving them a greyish sheen and a salty taste!
Producer Sarah Blunt.

SAT 15:30 Songs for the Dead (b07npx1f)
Keeners were the women of rural Ireland who were traditionally paid to cry, wail and sing over the bodies of the dead at funerals and wakes. Their role was to help channel the grief of the bereaved and they had an elevated, almost mythical status among their communities. The custom of keening had all but vanished by the 1950's as people began to view it as primitive, old-fashioned and uncivilised.

Now, broadcaster Marie-Louise Muir sets out to ask what's been lost with the passing of the keeners.

She travels to Inis Mor, a remote island off the west coast of Ireland, where one of Ireland's last professional keeners - Brigid Mullin - was recorded by the song collector and archivist Sidney Robertson Cowell in the 1950's. Brigid's crackling, eerie evocation of sorrow echoes down the years to capture a tradition in its dying days - a ghostly remnant of another world.

Dr Deirdre Ni Chonghaile is a native of Inis Mor and thinks modern funerals have taken on an almost Victorian dignity in a society that in general has become far less tolerant of extravagant displays of grief. Deirdre believes it was this very extravagance that helped lead to keening's demise. Its emphasis on the body and human mortality was in direct conflict with the notion of a Christian afterlife and the influential role of the keening women may even have been regarded as a threat to the patriarchy of the Church.

As the story of the keeners blends with the waves and winds of Ireland's west coast, Marie-Louise reflects on the passing of this once rich tradition.

Producer: Conor McKay.

Recordings:

Bridget Mullin with Sidney Robertson Cowell, keen performance and conversation.
Smithsonian Folkways, Ralph Rinzler Archives.

Neil O’Boyle, keen demonstration on fiddle.
Irish Traditional Music Archive, Dublin

Eithne Ni Uilleachan, ‘Grief’
from the album Bilingua (Gael Linn)

The Gloaming ‘The Pilgrim’s Song’
from the album ‘2’ (Real World)

Milk Carton Kids ‘Wish You Were Here’
(Anti/Epitaph)

Brian Eno ‘The Ship’
(Warp)

SAT 16:00 Woman's Hour (b07nn8wv)
Why has France banned the burkini?

Highlights from the Woman's Hour week.Presented by Jenni Murray
Producer: Rabeka Nurmahomed
Editor: Jane Thurlow.

SAT 17:00 PM (b07nn8wx)
Saturday PM

Full coverage of the day's news.

SAT 17:30 iPM (b07ns43m)
[Repeat of broadcast at 05:45 today]

SAT 17:54 Shipping Forecast (b07nn8wz)
The latest shipping forecast.

SAT 17:57 Weather (b07nn8x1)
The latest weather forecast.

SAT 18:00 Six O'Clock News (b07nn8x3)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.

SAT 18:15 Loose Ends (b07pd34m)
Clive Anderson, Arthur Smith, Mark Steel, Billy Bragg, Joe Henry, Dane Baptiste, Sophie Willan, Jethro Bradley, Rachel Sermanni

Clive Anderson and Arthur Smith are joined by Billy Bragg, Mark Steel, Dane Baptiste, Jethro Bradley and Sophie Willan for an eclectic mix of conversation, music and comedy at the Edinburgh Festival. With music from Billy Bragg and Joe Henry and Rachel Sermanni.

Producer: Sukey Firth.

SAT 19:00 Profile (b07pd34p)
Laura Trott

Mark Coles speaks to family, friends and colleagues of cyclist Laura Trott - the first British woman to win four Olympic golds - to find out how, after winning her first bike race at the age of eight, she has carried on winning ever since.

Producer: Smita Patel.

SAT 19:15 Saturday Review (b07nn8x5)
From the Edinburgh Festivals: The best of theatre, literature, comedy, surrealist artists, Tickled film and Herman Koch

From the Edinburgh Festivals: Tom Sutcliffe and his guests discuss their selection of what's on offer this year.
The National Theatre of Scotland's Anything That Gives off Light and Cheek by Jowl's Russian language Measure for Measure
Hermann Koch's new novel Dear Mr M,
Surrealist Encounters at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
The documentary film Tickled about the peculiar, secretive world of competitive tickling which has surprising menace lurking beneath the surface.
Also the guests present their personal choices from the enormous range of art on offer across the city
Tom Sutcliffe is joined by Denise Mina, Louise Welsh and Stuart Kelly. The producer is Oliver Jones.

SAT 20:00 Archive on 4 (b04dh0rq)
You Are Feeling Sleepy

The history and science of the use of hypnosis in medicine.

Hypnosis has BMA and BMJ approval, NHS support for helping with the likes of depression, anxiety, burns and childbirth, and a pedigree of being used to alleviate physical and mental pain for thousands of men in the Great War. Yet in the popular imagination, hypnosis is associated much more with quick-fix quacks and dodgy stage shows.

Perhaps that's not surprising when considering the likes of the 19th-century scientist Mesmer and his bogus animal magnetism theories. More recently, the misunderstanding of what hypnotism can and cannot do has created a slew of False Memory Syndrome incidents, with families destroyed by erroneous accusations of childhood sexual abuse. And then, under hypnosis, there have been claims of living former lives - with so-called 'regressive parties' inviting guests to 'come as they were'!

But as well as the charlatans and fakers, there have also been pioneers in genuine medical hypnosis, whose stories are less often told, but whose extraordinary dedication and impressive willingness to challenge the medical establishment, often at great personal cost, led to the clinical understanding of hypnosis that we have today.

In this Archive on 4, interviewees include psychiatrist Dr John Butler, illusionist Derren Brown, hypnotherapist and hypnotist Chris Green, hypno-birthing expert Tamara Ciafini, and Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago, Alison Winter.

And there is archive not only of the ground-breakers, but also of the bogus and the mystical, and variations both serious and hilarious of 'happiness sought through radical personal transformation'.

Producer: David Coomes.

SAT 21:00 Drama (b07nng5t)
Reading Europe - Greece: The Final Reckoning, Episode 1

Set in Greece in 2008, just prior to the elections that will bring Tsipris to power, The Final Reckoning by Petros Markaris, one of the country's
most popular writers, is a cleverly disguised police procedural which takes us beneath the headlines and exposes a country in moral as well as financial crisis.

Our story begins with the quadruple suicide of four elderly women, friends who can longer see how to survive in a country where poverty is an arm of government policy. But somehow the death of these four hapless women precipitates an outpouring of public anger. And this anger finds expression when some of Athens' wealthiest citizens start turning up dead, causing a dilemma for the Police and in particular, Superintendent Kosta Jaritos.

Jaritos was once in the Military Police, the strong arm of the hated dictatorship of The Generals who ruled Greece as recently as the 1970's, and as a young officer he did things he was ordered to and of which he is now far from proud. The guilt he feels about a man called Merenditis who died while in his custody just will not go away and he knows in his heart that this new wave of murders is somehow linked to the crimes of the past - the crimes he himself committed.

Ep 1 The Final Reckoning by Petros Markaris.
Dramatised for Radio by Michael Butt.

A Big Fish production for BBC Radio 4.

SAT 22:00 News and Weather (b07nn8x7)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4, followed by weather.

SAT 22:15 Inside the Ethics Committee (b07nrxd4)
Series 12, Sharing Genetic Information

Andrew is just 33 when he develops bowel cancer. Genetic tests reveal he has a genetic condition called Lynch Syndrome.

Lynch Syndrome has previously been diagnosed in a relative, but Andrew was never told that put him at risk. If he'd known, his cancer might have been spotted sooner and treated.

In a separate case, Lucy discovers that her father has Huntington's disease. She wonders whether to get tested for the gene herself. Unlike Lynch Syndrome the disease can't be treated or prevented so she is unsure whether there is any benefit to knowing.

Lucy's also concerned about what this means for her young son. If she had known about Huntington's sooner she could have chosen not to pass on the gene. But now it's too late - could he carry the Huntington's gene too? How and when should she break that news to him?

Joan Bakewell and her panel of experts discuss the ethics of sharing genetic information. Do doctors have a duty of care only to their patient or also to the wider family? How do they balance their patient's right to privacy with the wider family's right to information that could save their lives?

Producer: Lorna Stewart
Photo Credit: Serge Noel / Getty Images.

SAT 23:00 Counterpoint (b07npsmz)
Series 30, Heat 9, 2016

Competitors from Bradford, Nottinghamshire and Edinburgh join Paul Gambaccini to discover who'll take the last of the nine semi-final places in this 30th anniversary series of the eclectic music quiz.

To succeed, the competitors will have to remember two composers who've made operas of the story of Turandot, and recognise musical extracts by Rodgers & Hammerstein and Iggy Pop among others. That's even before they face their own set of individual questions on a musical topic of which they've had no prior warning.

At stake is a semi-final place and a chance to go forward to the 2016 Final in September.

Producer: Paul Bajoria.

SAT 23:30 A Sea Shanty for Charles Causley (b07nng5y)
When we look at the sea, W.H. Auden wrote: 'all that we are not stares back at what we are.' Jane Darke goes in search of the sea's truths as told by the Cornish poet Charles Causley. He was born and lived in the centre of the county and went to sea only during the Second World War as a sailor and yet the marine world shaped and defined his work. The filmmaker and writer Jane Darke lives in and works from a house just above a beach on the north Cornish coast. Her rooms are filled with salvaged objects from the shore. She has made a film about Charles Causley whose 100th anniversary falls next year. For this poetry feature the filmmaker and the poet put out to sea and we find their sea lives and their land lives running together like a tide up a beach. With performances of poems by Jim Causley and Julie Murphy, by Natalie Merchant and by the poet himself. Producer: Tim Dee.


SUNDAY 21 AUGUST 2016

SUN 00:00 Midnight News (b07pd4fh)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.

SUN 00:30 Stories from the Southern Cross (b04b2wzv)
The Mare's Nest

Stories from the Southern Cross consists of three new pieces of writing produced in collaboration with the first Australia New Zealand Literature Festival. Each story represents a new voice from the Antipodes - a place at once very familiar, but in fact quite different.

The series depicts a world of aggressive ennui, of suburban sprawl battling with a voracious bush and extreme weather, of taboos and generations colliding as old, White Australia comes to terms with another generation of migration.

The second of these three stories is Chris Womersley's The Mare's Nest, in which the narrator remembers his father's psychological disintegration, making him anything but the epitome of the Australian male - the bloke. The father's delusions were fuelled by a very real and extraordinary landscape, by myth and recent history, and by his own father's suicide which - in a culture of denial - becomes his 'disappearance'.

Producer: David Roper
A Heavy Entertainment production for BBC Radio 4.

SUN 00:48 Shipping Forecast (b07pd4fk)
The latest shipping forecast.

SUN 01:00 Selection of BBC World Service Programmes (b07pd4fm)
BBC Radio 4 joins the BBC World Service. BBC Radio 4 resumes at 5.20am.

SUN 05:20 Shipping Forecast (b07pd4fp)
The latest shipping forecast.

SUN 05:30 News Briefing (b07pd4fr)
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.

SUN 05:43 Bells on Sunday (b07pd793)
St Mary the Virgin, Ilminster

This week's Bells on Sunday comes from St. Mary the Virgin, Ilminster, Somerset, a large Minster church. There have been five bells in the tower from medieval times, augmented to six in 1861 and to eight in 1907. We hear all eight bells ringing here, Grandsire Triples.

SUN 05:45 Profile (b07pd34p)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:00 on Saturday]

SUN 06:00 News Headlines (b07pd4ft)
The latest national and international news.

SUN 06:05 Something Understood (b07pd796)
Passion

Mark Tully explores the concept of passion and investigates contemporary understandings of the word. From passion in a traditional religious context to its everyday use in a personal and in a corporate sense, the idea of this strongest of emotions still appears to hold sway in the thinking of many.

Is it simply an overused construct stretched to its limits by hyperbole or an important concept in philosophical, psychological and spiritual disciplines?

We see passion through the eyes of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, poets Linda France and John Keats and musicians Oscar Serpo and Gioaccino Rossini.

The readers are Jonathan Broadbent, Francis Cadder and Adjoa Andoh.

Presenter: Mark Tully
Producer: Frank Stirling
A Unique production for BBC Radio 4.

SUN 06:35 The Living World (b07pd799)
The Ways of the Wasp

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

For many I suspect the sting of a yellow and black banded wasp is the first thought when confronted with these fascinating aerial predators. But as entomologist Tom Ings explains to Lionel Kelleway in this programme from 2000, wasps are more often benign and beneficial than people realise. There are many wasp species in the UK and to fins some of them Lionel and Tom head to a Bristol garden. Quickly come across a number of wasp species, and a few we may think of as wasps but are not. In doing so Lionel discovers wasps are more beneficial than first thought and play a vital role in controlling predators. Later, heading indoors, Lionel receives a timely piece of advice as he peers into a very active wasp nest in the roof space. Don't poke it with a stick.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

SUN 06:57 Weather (b07pd4fx)
The latest weather forecast.

SUN 07:00 News and Papers (b07pd4g1)
The latest news headlines. Including a look at the papers.

SUN 07:10 Sunday (b07pd4g3)
Does God mean gold, Eruv opposition, Church clown

Religious and ethical news.

SUN 07:54 Radio 4 Appeal (b07pd79g)
Bhopal Medical Appeal

Sir Mark Tully presents The Radio 4 Appeal on behalf of Bhopal Medical Appeal.
Registered Charity No 1117526
To Give:
- Freephone 0800 404 8144
- Freepost BBC Radio 4 Appeal. (That's the whole address. Please do not write anything else on the front of the envelope). Mark the back of the envelope 'Bhopal Medical Appeal'
- Cheques should be made payable to 'Bhopal Medical Appeal'.

SUN 07:57 Weather (b07pd4g5)
The latest weather forecast.

SUN 08:00 News and Papers (b07pd4g7)
The latest news headlines. Including a look at the papers.

SUN 08:10 Sunday Worship (b07pd79r)
All My Hope on God Is Founded

The Revd Dr Janet Wootton and the Revd Ally Barrett reflect on the ways Christian communities and individuals respond to life events through song. With the Coventry Singers directed by Paul Leddington Wright and accompanied by Daniel Moult. Producer: Stephen Shipley.

SUN 08:48 A Point of View (b07ns0r9)
Finding Our Roots

Will Self reflects on the joys of genealogy - truffling in census returns and parish records and establishing "our genuine links to multiple generations of nonentities"!

"As a passionate Londoner", he writes, "I wanted to establish when the first Self had arrived in the city".

Entire family sagas, he says, are today vanishing into thin air, in an era of nuclear families. Gone are those generations of extended families where over a cup of tea, the same old stories were told about the same old relatives.

Producer: Adele Armstrong.

SUN 08:58 Tweet of the Day (b02tws57)
Cirl Bunting

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs. Steve Backshall presents the cirl bunting.

Cirl buntings are related to yellowhammers and look rather like them, but the male cirl bunting has a black throat and a greenish chest-band.

Their rattling song may evoke memories of warm dry hillsides in France or Italy. Cirl buntings are Mediterranean birds more at home in olive groves than chilly English hedgerows. Here at the north-western edge of their range, most of our cirl buntings live near the coast in south Devon where they breed in hedgerows on farmland.

SUN 09:00 Broadcasting House (b07pd4g9)
Sunday morning magazine programme with news and conversation about the big stories of the week. Presented by Paddy O'Connell.

SUN 10:00 The Archers Omnibus (b07pdd7p)
Henry is waved off to the beach, and Alice gives Pip food for thought.

SUN 11:15 The Reunion (b07pdd7r)
The Yorkshire Ripper Investigation

Sue MacGregor meets detectives and a journalist involved in the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, the biggest criminal investigation in British history at the time.

In 1975, a series of murders began in Leeds that would soon stretch to Bradford, Huddersfield, Halifax and Manchester. It would take more than five years for police to finally arrest Peter Sutcliffe, a Bradford lorry driver, whose brutal attacks on women claimed at least 13 lives and left many others permanently injured. The failure to catch the killer attracted widespread criticism.

Four former detectives join Sue MacGregor to remember the investigation. John Domaille was a senior officer who later became Assistant Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police; Andy Laptew was a junior detective who interviewed Peter Sutcliffe and flagged him up as a serious suspect, but whose warnings fell on deaf ears; Elaine Benson was a rare female detective who worked in the incident room and interviewed suspects; and David Zackrisson investigated the "Wearside Jack" tape and letters in Sunderland, a disastrous red herring from a man claiming to be the killer that later turned out to be a hoax. Christa Ackroyd was then a local journalist in Halifax, who remembers the impact the killings had on women living in the North of England.

Producer: Deborah Dudgeon
Series Producer: David Prest

A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.

SUN 12:00 News Summary (b07pd4gf)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.

SUN 12:04 Just a Minute (b07npvfc)
Series 76, Episode 2

Nicholas Parsons and guests return for the 76th series of the panel show where participants must try to speak for 60 seconds without hesitation, deviation or repetition. No repetition? That's no small order after nearly 50 years.

Paul Merton, now the second most prolific player of the game after Kenneth Williams, is joined by Julian Clary, Tony Hawks and Zoe Lyons and will be tackling topics such as 'Let them eat cake', 'A Brief Encounter', but get sidetracked by a debate on chips.

Hayley Sterling blows the whistle.

Produced by Matt Stronge.

It was a BBC Studios Production.

SUN 12:32 Food Programme (b07pdd7t)
Time for an Aperitif? The Drinks Menu

In French, 'l'aperitif', in Italian, 'l'aperitivo'. We don't of course have a translation in English, but the aperitif, the drinks and snacks which proceed a meal have long captured our imaginations. The sounds and smells of Mediterranean holidays, the tastes of a summer day... and those glamorous and just a bit tacky TV adverts from the 70s. ('Dubonnet vous?')

Food writer Diana Henry fell for those adverts, and then experienced l'aperitif as a teenager on a French exchange. Now, with the rise and rise of low alcohol, sprtizy cocktails in our pubs and bars, Diana wants you to embrace the aperitif, in its many forms and flavours. She explores the history of the aperitivo in Italy, from it's Roman origins to it's significance for the Futurist movement. In France, she reflects on the cultural and social significance of aperitif, and hears how once deemed old fashioned, brands like Suze, and Dubonnet are making a comeback. And in Britain, she discovers chefs making their own infusions with ingredients from a Suffolk garden and the Somerset countryside.

In the first of The Food Programme's summer drinks series 'The Drinks Menu', Diana wants you to take a moment, a cold glass, some ice and a bottle and appreciate an aperitif.

Presented by Diana Henry
Produced by Clare Salisbury.

SUN 12:57 Weather (b07pd4gh)
The latest weather forecast.

SUN 13:00 The World This Weekend (b07pd4gk)
Global news and analysis.

SUN 13:30 Fantasy Festival (b07pdd7w)
Chris Beardshaw

Garden designer Chris Beardshaw joins presenter Verity Sharp to create and curate the festival of his wildest dreams. It's a chance for Chris to set the festival's agenda, chose the guests, pick the acts, dictate the weather, the food and the ambience. A festival where anyone - dead or alive - can be summoned to perform, and nothing is unimaginable.

Chris outlines his dream festival which takes place in an Egyptian Death Garden. It's a festival for a tiny audience and it happens in a small space and short time frame. He wants to take time out with his loved ones to reconsider the detail of life, celebrate craftsmanship and wonder at our place in the universe. He's bringing music from Pachelbel, Brian Eno and Green Day and poetry from Theo Dorgan. He's created a Paradise and, when his festival is over, the Death Garden will be handed over to another festival goer to invite their loved ones to experience their own 24 hour festival in this very special, walled space. And so the festival will be handed ever onwards.

Producer: Rosie Boulton
A Monty Funk production for BBC Radio 4.

SUN 14:00 Gardeners' Question Time (b07ns0qs)
The Olympic Park

Eric Robson hosts the horticultural panel programme in Essex, four years on from the London Olympics. Matthew Wilson, Christine Walkden and Pippa Greenwood answer the audience questions.

Matthew Wilson also takes a tour of the Olympic Park to see how things have grown over the past four years.

Produced by Darby Dorras
Assistant producer: Laurence Bassett

A Somethin' Else production for BBC Radio 4.

SUN 14:45 The Listening Project (b07pdd7y)
Sunday Omnibus - What We Choose to Tell

Fi Glover introduces conversations about the challenges facing relationships and creativity when they fall outside the standard parameters, in the Omnibus edition of the series that proves it's surprising what you hear when you listen.

The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they've never discussed intimately before. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation - they're not BBC interviews, and that's an important difference - lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Most of the unedited conversations are being archived by the British Library and used to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium. You can learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject

Producer: Marya Burgess.

SUN 15:00 Drama (b07pdd80)
Reading Europe - Greece: The Final Reckoning, Episode 2

It's 2008, just prior to the Greek elections that will bring Tsipris to power, and a serial killer calling himself The National Tax Collector continues to pick off Athens' wealthy elite with seeming impunity.

The mounting numbers of victims dumped at the city's most historical sites is putting Inspector Kostas Jaritos of the Athens Police under growing political pressure. To make matter worse, Jaritos is a man with problems and past of his own to worry about. And those problems are about to get a whole lot worse.

The killer has somehow found out about Jaritos' role with the military police under the fascist junta in the 1970s and is about to use this knowledge to devastating effect.

Written by Petros Markaris, one of Greece's most popular writers.

Written by Petros Markaris
Directed by Eoin O'Callaghan

A Big Fish Radio production for Radio 4.

SUN 16:00 Open Book (b07pdd82)
Edinburgh Special: Raja Alem and Richard T Kelly

A special edition of Open Book recorded at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Mariella Frostrup is joined by writers Raja Alem, Richard T Kelly and Benjamin Markovits and the director of the festival Nick Barley to discuss the place where politics meets fiction - from the overtly political novels of writers like Trollope and Michael Dobbs, to the way that fiction can challenge our pre-conceptions and open up new worlds for us.

SUN 16:30 Poetry Please (b07pdd84)
Elizabeth Bishop and Jorge Luis Borges

Roger McGough opens a caixa de sol, a box of sun, and presents a selection of poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Jorge Luis Borges and others from Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. The readers are Barbara Flynn and Tom Courtenay. Producer: Tim Dee.

SUN 17:00 Personalised Medicine: Dose by Design (b07npz1m)
Personalised medicine means the right treatment for the right person at the right time. It's a revolution in healthcare that's apparently been heading to our local surgery ever since the first human genome sequence was announced in 2000. Our individual genetic barcodes, we've been told, will inform our personal medical care through our lifetimes. The one-size-fits-all medical model is dead, long live precision medicine.

But although genetic medicine and personalised care is happening in startling ways up and down the country (from cancer to HIV treatment to inherited diabetes) wholesale adoption of genomics to prevent, diagnose and treat disease, has some way to go.

Vivienne Parry, life long genetics enthusiast, now helping to deliver the 100,000 Genomes Project, investigates whether the NHS, at a time of huge financial uncertainty, can be nimble enough, decisive enough and forward-thinking enough, to overcome institutional inertia and adapt and deliver the benefits of genomic medicine for all.

Producer: Fiona Hill.

SUN 17:40 Profile (b07pd34p)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:00 on Saturday]

SUN 17:54 Shipping Forecast (b07pd4gp)
The latest shipping forecast.

SUN 17:57 Weather (b07pd4gr)
The latest weather forecast.

SUN 18:00 Six O'Clock News (b07pd4gt)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.

SUN 18:15 Pick of the Week (b07pddl5)
Terry Christian

Terry Christian chooses his BBC Radio highlights.

SUN 19:00 The Archers (b07pddl7)
Rob has got some news for Henry, and Jill is thinking about Freda Fry.

SUN 19:15 Fred MacAulay's Wet Hot Political Summer (b07pn82g)
Fred MacAulay looks at the momentous summer of 2016, a tumultuous period which saw (in no particular order) Brexit, the resignations of David Cameron, Roy Hodgson and Chris Evans, the non-resignation of Jeremy Corbyn, A new female PM, Labour leadership challenges, Nicola Sturgeon and the possibility of another Scottish referendum and Olympic glory!

Recorded at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Fred is joined by Rory Bremner, Andy Zaltzman, Ahir Shah and Gráinne Maguire, with stand up from Shappi Korshandi and Jonathan Pie.

"Wet Hot Political Summer" addresses the tumult of the summer of 2016, and begin to make sense of the new political landscape.

Host: Fred MacAulay

Panelists:

Rory Bremner
Andy Zaltzman
Ahir Shah
Gráinne Maguire

Stand Up:

Shappi Korshandi
Jonathan Pie

Host's Script by Gareth Gwynn, Jack Bernhardt, Liam Bierne and Max Davis.

Producer: Adnan Ahmed

A BBC Studios Production.

SUN 19:45 Reading Europe: Italian Snapshots (b07pdffm)
A Red Rose

A specially commissioned translation from the master of the Italian short story - Stefano Benni. An elderly man addresses a group gathered in a boardroom, he begins to tell them a story about a girl he once knew.

The author Stefano Benni is widely considered one of Italy's foremost contemporary novelists. His trademark mix of biting social satire and magical realism has turned each of his books into a national bestseller. His many novels include Bar Sport, The Company of Celestini, The Cafe Beneath the Sea, and the remarkably successful Margherita Dolce Vita. Benni is also the author of several volumes of essays and poetry and many collections of short stories. He lives in Bologna, Italy.

Written by Stefano Benni
Translated by Alta L. Price
Read by James Laurenson
Abridged by Jill Waters and produced by Lizzie Davies
A Waters Company production for BBC Radio 4.

SUN 20:00 More or Less (b07ns0qy)
Counting Terror Deaths

Is 2016 an unusually deadly year for terrorism?

In a joint investigation with BBC Newsbeat and BBC Monitoring, we've analysed nearly 25,000 news articles to assess whether 2016 so far has been a unusually deadly year for terrorism. It certainly feels like it. But what do the numbers say? We estimate that, between January and July this year, 892 people died in terrorist attacks in Europe - making it the most deadly first seven months of a year since 1994. But the vast majority of those deaths have been in Turkey. The number for Western Europe is 143, which is lower than many years in the 1970s.

Dying 'at the hands of the police'

This week retired footballer Dalian Atkinson died after being 'tasered' by police. His death has renewed concerns about the number of people who die after coming into contact with the police. Recently it was claimed that one person a week dies 'at the hands of the police' and that 'black people are disproportionately affected.' We take a look at the numbers.

Olympic predictions

As the Games in Rio draw to an end, we look back at the medal predictions we made before they started. Which countries have performed as expected? And which failed to meet our expectations?

The cost of a wedding gift

Can economics tell us how much to spend on a wedding gift? Our reporter Jordan is in a tight spot. He's heading to an old friend's wedding and needs to figure out how little he can get away with spending on a gift. Luckily, economist Maria Kozlovskaya is on hand to explain her findings on our 'internal exchange rate' for gift giving. Can she preserve Jordan's friendship while protecting his wallet?

SUN 20:30 Last Word (b07ns0qv)
Julian Worricker on:

Shahram Amiri, the Iranian nuclear scientist whose disappearance in 2009 provoked allegations that he was either a spy or a double agent

The violinist Professor Paul Robertson, who for almost 40 years was the leader of the renowned Medici Quartet

The social anthropologist and psychoanalyst Elizabeth Spillius who brought the ideas of Melanie Klein to a new audience

Bob Kiley, the former CIA agent who was recruited by Ken Livingstone to run public transport in London

And determined Marxist, Tony Chater, who edited the Morning Star newspaper for 21 years.

SUN 21:00 Your Money and Your Life (b07pd34k)
[Repeat of broadcast at 12:04 on Saturday]

SUN 21:26 Radio 4 Appeal (b07pd79g)
[Repeat of broadcast at 07:54 today]

SUN 21:30 In Business (b07nrxds)
A Virtual World

A new technology is emerging which could change the world as significantly as mobile phones or the Internet. That technology is Virtual Reality. Up to now it's mainly been used for fun - but things are changing. Adam Shaw investigates how VR could change our lives and revolutionise the world of business. Enabling us to be in two places at once and, for example, replacing the need for many painkillers and helping cure psychological problems.

Producer Smita Patel.

SUN 22:00 Westminster Hour (b07pd4gy)
Weekly political discussion and analysis with MPs, experts and commentators.

SUN 23:00 The Film Programme (b07nrxdj)
Swallows and Amazons

With Antonia Quirke.

Antonia is joined by 18 year old vlogger and Into Film journalist, Ceyda Uzun, on her first press interview junket: an interview with the writer of Swallows And Amazons, Andrea Gibb.

Poet Don Paterson continues his series on great speeches in movie history with Rutger Hauer's philosophical monologue in Blade Runner. "Like tears in the rain".

As thriller 'The Shallows' continues to do well at the US Box office, director James Watkins discusses how the point of view of the camera is crucial to dramatic suspense.

SUN 23:30 Something Understood (b07pd796)
[Repeat of broadcast at 06:05 today]


MONDAY 22 AUGUST 2016

MON 00:00 Midnight News (b07pd4k0)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.

MON 00:15 Self's Search for Meaning (b07gf9lc)
Faith

Will Self asks some of Britain's key opinion-makers to share, in simple terms, their conclusions about the nature - and meaning - of our existence.

MON 00:45 Bells on Sunday (b07pd793)
[Repeat of broadcast at 05:43 on Sunday]

MON 00:48 Shipping Forecast (b07pd4k2)
The latest shipping forecast.

MON 01:00 Selection of BBC World Service Programmes (b07pd4k4)
BBC Radio 4 joins the BBC World Service.

MON 05:20 Shipping Forecast (b07pd4k6)
The latest shipping forecast.

MON 05:30 News Briefing (b07pd4k8)
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.

MON 05:43 Prayer for the Day (b07r25fp)
A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Shaunaka Rishi Das, Director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.

MON 05:45 Farming Today (b07pd4kd)
Harvest time, Seaweed pollution, Rural pubs

The latest news about food, farming and the countryside. Presented by Felicity Evans and produced by Alun Beach.

MON 05:56 Weather (b07pd4kg)
The latest weather forecast for farmers.

MON 05:58 Tweet of the Day (b038qk9b)
Bluethroat

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs.

Brett Westwood presents the bluethroat. This is a fine songbird and a sprightly robin-sized bird with a dazzling sapphire bib. Your best chance of seeing one is in autumn when they pass through the north or east coast on migration.

MON 06:00 Today (b07pd4kj)
News and current affairs. Includes Sports Desk, Weather and Thought for the Day.

MON 09:00 Playing the Skyline (b07pf1b6)
Series 2, Belfast Docks

In 'Playing the Skyline' Tim Marlow joins two musicians as they look at how the land meets the air, and imagine it as music. They give their responses, then begin playing the skyline, before creating new pieces. Later, Tim hears how they are getting on and, finally, he and Radio 4's listeners hear the finished works and the musicians consider each other's pieces.

In the final programme in this series Tim Marlow returns to an urban skyline, next to the Harland and Woolf shipyard in Belfast. Here the city's composer laureate, Brian Irvine, shelters from the rain beneath the Titanic Centre. He is amazingly prolific, his work ranging from collaboration with Seamus Heaney on an orchestral piece to an oratorio for 500 children. He settles down, manuscript paper in hand, looks at the skyline and sketches like a painter. But the strokes Brian makes are notes of music, bar lines, and dynamic markings. Remarkably, they closely resemble the industrial shapes on the skyline - an oil-rig, huge gantries, ships and sheds.

The multi-instrumentalist, Rachael Boyd, who creates melodic soundscapes, plays her initial response to the skyline as she looks at it, on her violin. Then, next to Brian, she begins to write it, too. What is intriguing, and crucial, is that two artists can look at the same skyline and be struck by it in entirely different ways. The notes on Rachael's manuscript undulate, capturing the rhythmic flow of the hills that surround Belfast which, even as she writes, are shrouded in cloud and rain, and disappear.

How will the musicians resolve these sketches into complete compositions? How, if at all, will the musical traditions of this troubled city influence these two different pieces, that play the same Belfast skyline?

Producer: Julian May.

MON 09:30 Our Man in Greeneland (b07pf1b8)
Our Man in Havana

To complement BBC Radio 4's season of Graham Greene dramas, the BBC's man in Havana, Will Grant, follows in the footsteps of Graham Greene's novel and screenplay, Our Man in Havana. He explores Greene's portrayal of pre-Revolutionary Cuba and the making of the film in Havana, in the early months of Fidel Castro's new regime. He talks to Cuban author Leonardo Padura and film critic Carlos Galiano.

Readings by James Lailey and Sean Baker.
Produced by Emma Harding.

MON 09:45 Book of the Week (b07pf1bb)
Wish Lanterns, Episode 1

The stories of young Chinese lives, particularly those young people born under the one-child policy of the 1980s, as they seek to negotiate the expectations of those around them and their own inner desires for self-fulfilment.

Dahai is a military child and a rebel, Fred is a daughter of the Party and Xiaoxiao grew up in the far north and longed to travel south. All were infants when the tanks rolled through Beijing in 1989 and none really know much about their country's recent past. But the way China develops in the future is very much something that will affect their lives - and their behaviour and decisions will affect ours.

There are approximately 322 million Chinese aged between 16 and 30 - a group larger than the population of the USA and destined to have an unprecedented influence on global affairs in the coming years. The one-child policy has led to a generation of only children. There is intense competition for education and jobs, and a tug-of-war between cultural change and tradition, nationalism and the lures of the West. We know the headlines of their lives, but what of the details?

Written by Alec Ash
Read by David Seddon
Abridged and Produced by Jill Waters
A Waters Company production for BBC Radio 4.

MON 10:00 Woman's Hour (b07pd4kl)
Programme that offers a female perspective on the world.

MON 10:45 15 Minute Drama (b07pf1bd)
Blood and Milk, Episode 1

by Gregory Evans

Thrilling new series set in 1890s Whitechapel. Welsh farm girl Megan Evans comes to London to visit her brother who is running the family's dairy business - but her brother is strangely unwelcoming.

Directed by Marc Beeby

In 1900 over half London's milk came from Welsh dairies. One of those dairies, on the Commercial Road, was owned and run by the writer's family.

MON 11:00 The Untold (b07pf1bg)
Revisited

Grace Dent hears from some of the people featured in previous episodes of The Untold. Updates include the fate of Bristol's DJ Derek and the latest on 73 year old Jean, who was being harassed by her estranged husband. Also, 23 year old Thomas reflects on fatherhood following the result of a positive paternity test. Producer: Laurence Grissell.

MON 11:30 The Rest Is History (b04v2ssq)
Series 1, Episode 1

Frank Skinner loves history, but just doesn't know much of it.

The Rest Is History is a new comedy discussion show which promises to help him find out more about it.

Along with his historian in residence Dr Kate Williams, each episode sees Frank joined by a selection of celebrity guests, who will help him navigate his way through the annals of time, picking out and chewing over the funniest, oddest, and most interesting moments in history.

Frank's guests in this edition of the programme are Dave Gorman and Sara Pascoe

Produced by Dan Schreiber and Justin Pollard
An Avalon production for BBC Radio 4.

MON 12:00 News Summary (b07pd4kn)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.

MON 12:04 Home Front (b07kcj3q)
22 August 1916 - Juliet Cavendish

On this day in 1916, 15,000 pilgrims gathered at Lourdes to pray for the safe return of their fathers from war, and Juliet is finding it hard to reconcile her delight and her fears.

Written by Katie Hims
Directed by Jessica Dromgoole.

MON 12:15 You and Yours (b07pd4ks)
Caged hens, Tiger stores, CD and vinyl box sets

Sales of organic and free range eggs are rising. And more supermarkets are saying they plan to stop selling eggs from caged hens. Winifred Robinson's been to see for herself what a modern caged hen farm is like.
The boss of Tiger stores tells us why he thinks Denmark has the answer for the British high street.
And they can cost hundreds of pounds but what makes the perfect CD or Vinyl deluxe box set?

MON 12:57 Weather (b07pd4kv)
The latest weather forecast.

MON 13:00 World at One (b07pd4kx)
Analysis of news and current affairs.

MON 13:45 Unforgettable (b07pf4vy)
David Temple/Derek Jarman

David Temple has an imagined conversation with his late brother-in-law, Derek Jarman. The two differ in many ways but their mutual affection, and a similar sense of humour, shine across the 22 years since Derek's death, as they share impressions of Jarman's films.

There is much laughter in the exchange between the living and the deceased as David and Derek recount stories of film premieres and family Christmases. There is sadness also as Jarman talks of the death of his mother from cancer. Temple tells Jarman of a death, also from cancer, that he did not live long enough to know of, that of Derek's sister, David's wife. Derek's own HIV-related death is a constant backdrop to the dialogue.

At times it's easy to suspend disbelief and to imagine these two men are actually in the same room together, catching up after more than two decades apart, such is the spontaneity and quiet energy of their conversation.

In 1991 Natalie Cole sang a duet with her long dead father, Nat King Cole - the result was Unforgettable. This is the radio equivalent. In each edition of the series, a different guest is invited to interact with someone, now dead, with whom they have, or have wanted to have, a connection. Using technology designed for musicians and DJs to spontaneously play out short musical clips, producer Adam Fowler facilitates a real-time conversation between the two participants, using conversational snippets of the deceased from past recordings.

The guest has no advance knowledge of the excerpts, and the conversation can take unexpected turns, occasionally leading to some emotionally charged interchanges, as living voices engage with those preserved in the archive.

Research: Philippa Geering
Producer: Adam Fowler
An Overtone production for BBC Radio 4.

MON 14:00 The Archers (b07pddl7)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:00 on Sunday]

MON 14:15 Afternoon Drama (b04hv9xy)
Ghosts of Heathrow

Heathrow is Europe's busiest airport with 190,000 visitors each day. It is also the setting of a conspicuously large number of ghost stories. On Runway 1 there have been recurring sightings of a wandering man wearing a pin-striped suit and bowler hat, dating back to the 1948 DCS Dakota plane crash, Heathrow's first major air incident.

Based on original research interviews, Ghosts of Heathrow draws on this and other pieces of local folklore to create a psychic adventure set in and around the airport.

Martin is a senior marketing consultant based in San Diego attending a conference in Heathrow. The night before his presentation he receives an unwelcome visitor in his hotel room. Forced out into the wilds of Hounslow Heath he finds himself chasing down some ghosts of his own.

Writer Sebastian Baczkiewicz is the creator of the returning Radio 4 series Pilgrim, and one of the UK's leading radio dramatists.

Written by Sebastian Baczkiewicz
Produced / directed by Joby Waldman
Sound design by Eloise Whitmore

A Somethin Else production for BBC Radio 4.

MON 15:00 Counterpoint (b07pf6ws)
Series 30, Semi-Final 1, 2016

(10/13)
Paul Gambaccini welcomes the first three semi-finalists of the 2016 series to the Radio Theatre in London. The pace really hots up now, as the competitors are all heat winners and will all be keen to secure a place in the series Final in September.

The range of their musical knowledge will be put to the test as Paul asks them to identify (among other things) a Beethoven symphony, a piece of English brass band music and a recent Mark Ronson remix - along with an unexpected version of 'Stand By Me'.

Producer: Paul Bajoria.

MON 15:30 Food Programme (b07pdd7t)
[Repeat of broadcast at 12:32 on Sunday]

MON 16:00 My Muse (b07pfc34)
Kathryn Williams on Sylvia Plath

My Muse: in the first of a 3 part series artists describe the artists that inspire them. The award winning singer songwriter Kathryn Williams was motivated to write an entire album, Hypoxia, by the work of the poet Sylvia Plath.

Kathryn was commissioned to write some songs for the Durham Book Festival to mark the 50th anniversary of Sylvia Plath's death and the publication of her novel, The Bell Jar. She wanted to write something that got away from the popular tragic image of Sylvia Plath who killed herself at the age of just 30. Instead Kathryn wanted to focus on the writing. Plath is considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.

Once the commission was over Kathryn couldn't stop writing and decided these songs would be her next album. She got stuck and called on the singer songwriter and producer Ed Harcourt for help, who we hear from in the programme. Kathryn also speaks to Andrew Wilson author of Mad Girl's Love Song, a biography of Plath's early life. They meet at Parliament Hill Fields, one of the many places in England that inspired Plath. Another is Hardcastle Crags in West Yorkshire where Kathryn goes on a walk with the poet Sarah Corbett, author of And She Was. For the first time - and amidst cracking thunder - Kathryn visits the grave of Sylvia Plath along with Gail Crowther, author of The Haunted Reader and Sylvia Plath.

Kathryn wants to concentrate on Plath's work, not her death, so ends with Deryn Rees-Jones, also a poet and a critic and Professor of Poetry at Liverpool University, where a collection of some of Plath's manuscripts are held.

Producer: Nicola Swords, BBC Radio Production North.

MON 16:30 Beyond Belief (b07pfc36)
Sharia Councils

The government has launched an inquiry into the role of sharia councils in the UK. The councils are able to provide advice to Muslims who voluntarily choose to use them to resolve civil and family disputes. But human rights campaigners have become increasingly concerned about the rights of women who access the councils. The Home Office said it would examine claims that sharia councils may be working in a "discriminatory and unacceptable way", issuing divorces that are unfair to women, contrary to the teachings of Islam. However, it will also seek out examples of best practice among sharia councils. So what is the real picture? How can we separate the facts from the misconceptions?

Ernie Rea explores the role of sharia councils in the UK with Dr Amra Bone, who is on the panel for the Sharia Council based in Birmingham Central Mosque; Dr Samia Bano, an expert in Muslim family law in the UK at SOAS, University of London; and Maryam Namazie, a human rights activist from the campaign group 'One Law for All'.

Producer: Dan Tierney
Series producer: Amanda Hancox.

MON 17:00 PM (b07pd4kz)
Eddie Mair with interviews, context and analysis.

MON 18:00 Six O'Clock News (b07pd4l1)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.

MON 18:30 Just a Minute (b07pfc38)
Series 76, Episode 3

Nicholas Parsons and guests return for the 76th series of the panel show where participants must try to speak for 60 seconds without hesitation, deviation or repetition. No repetition? That's no small order after nearly 50 years.

This is a very special episode coming from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and features the following guests: Paul Merton, Janey Godley, Nish Kumar and Marcus Brigstocke.

Hayley Sterling blows the whistle.

Produced by Matt Stronge.

It is a BBC Studios production.

MON 19:00 The Archers (b07pfc3b)
Toby has some explaining to do, and Kaz is feeling powerless.

MON 19:15 Front Row (b07pd4l3)
Arts news, interviews and reviews.

MON 19:45 15 Minute Drama (b07pf1bd)
[Repeat of broadcast at 10:45 today]

MON 20:00 Rethinking Clink (b07pfc3d)
Episode 1

When he was Prime Minister, David Cameron promised "the biggest shake-up of prisons since Victorian times" in England and Wales. "For too long we have left our prisons to fester," he said. "So today, we start the long-overdue, long-needed change that our prisons need." But Mr Cameron was neither the first nor the last PM to promise major changes in the penal system.

In this series, former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith goes back to basics to examine 250 years of prison reform - and through this prism to understand our changing and often contradictory ideas of the purpose of incarceration. She hears about the power of religious belief in shaping early reform, and the individuals whose experiments went terribly wrong. How did celebrity prisoners change public views?

Episode 1 will examine the history of prison reform from the 18th century to the end of the Second World War. Over this whole period we see the interplay of very different motives for incarceration. Was imprisonment to punish? For retribution? To deter? To rehabilitate? To remove offenders from society? Or simply so inmates could work to pay back their debts?

Presented by former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith
Producer Chris Bowlby.

MON 20:30 Crossing Continents (b07pfchg)
Colombia's Forgotten Exodus

In the Colombian capital of Bogota, Lucy Ash meets two people who fear they will never be able to return to their homes. They both come from Choco, which is one of the poorest provinces and most violent parts of the country. Maria, an Afro-Colombian mother of four, fled her town after she was abducted and brutally attacked by paramilitaries. Plinio was trying to help members of his indigenous community go back to their farms when he received death threats from a splinter group of left wing guerrilla (the ELN) and his friend was assassinated.

Their stories illustrate a nationwide trauma - the government may be on the brink of a historic peace deal with the FARC rebels, but Colombia has even more internally displaced people than Syria. More than 200,000 have been killed and seven million driven off their land during half a century of war. Lucy travels down the River Baudo to meet people uprooted from their jungle villages in violent clashes earlier this year and finds that Latin America's longest insurgency is far from over.

Reported and produced by Lucy Ash.

MON 21:00 Natural Histories (b07npx0h)
Great Auk

In 1844, three men landed on the island of Eldey off the coast of Iceland and crept up on a pair of Great Auks which had an egg in a nest and killed the birds and trampled on the egg.These are believed to have been the last Great Auks which ever lived. Being flightless birds the men had little trouble catching and killing them. As one of the hunters recalled "I took him by the neck and he flapped his wings, he made no cry, I strangled him." The irony is that once they became extinct, Great Auks became even more sought after; this time by collectors of their skins and eggs. Today there are thought to be 75 specimens in museums or private collections. In this programme, Brett Westwood visits the Great North Museum to see two of these; an adult and a juvenile, before meeting writer and painter Errol Fuller; the proud owner of a Great Auk egg; a beautiful but tragic reminder of what once was. But that isn't the end of the story as Brett discovers because a group of scientists are hoping to bring the birds back from extinction in a process called De-extinction. All this Charles Kingsley, Ogden Nash, a Golden egg and a glass foot are in this extraordinary tale of an "extinct superstar". Readers: Pippa Haywood, Brian Protheroe. Producer: Sarah Blunt.

MON 21:30 Playing the Skyline (b07pf1b6)
[Repeat of broadcast at 09:00 today]

MON 21:58 Weather (b07pd4l5)
The latest weather forecast.

MON 22:00 The World Tonight (b07pd4l7)
In-depth reporting and analysis from a global perspective.

MON 22:45 Book at Bedtime (b07pfc3g)
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, Episode 6

Nearly 30 years on from its original publication, Hilary Mantel's third novel is still as disturbing, incisive and illuminating as ever. In an unusual collaboration, the author has revisited the book to create, with the abridger, this new ten-part serialisation.

Frances Shore is a cartographer by trade, but when her husband's work takes them to Saudi Arabia she finds herself unable to map either the ever changing landscape or the Kingdom's heavily veiled ways of working. The regime is corrupt and harsh, the expatriates are hard-drinking money-grubbers, and her Muslim neighbours are secretive and watchful.

She soon discovers that the streets are not a woman's territory. Confined in her flat, she finds her sense of self beginning to dissolve. She hears footsteps, sounds of distress from the supposedly empty flat above. She has only constantly changing rumours to hang on to, and no one with whom to share her creeping unease.

In episode six, Frances gives her first dinner party.

Reader: Anna Maxwell Martin
Author: Hilary Mantel
Abridger: Sara Davies
Producer: Alexa Moore
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

MON 23:00 Hersey's Hiroshima (b07pfdvw)
On a bright summer's day in 1945 the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The following year, The New Yorker devoted an entire edition to one article written and printed in secrecy. Alistair Cooke called it the greatest piece of journalism ever and, around fifty years later, it was given first place in the panoply of 20th century journalism.

John Hersey's Hiroshima rocked the world in its unflinching account of what it was like to be under atomic attack. He exposed the nature of radiation disease to the general public. He gave names and significance to a people who - only a short time before - had been a faceless mortal enemy, the yellow peril of the cartoon strips.

The world's media clamoured for publishing and broadcasting rights and the new BBC Third Programme read it on air. It was then repeated shortly afterwards on the Light Programme, to ensure even more people could hear it.

Seventy years on, it has never been out of print.

Peter Curran explores the background to the article and asks why these thirty thousand words have had such an enduring impact.

Presenter: Peter Curran
Readers: Nathan Osgood and Michael Eaves
Cast from a 1948 Third Programme broadcast of Hiroshima: Sheila Sim, Russell Napier, Mary Laura Wood, Alec Mango and Manning Wilson.
With contributions from David Remnick, Professor Jeremy Treglown, Dr Jonathan Hogg and Rachel Cooke.

Producer: Caroline Raphael
A Dora production for BBC Radio 4.

MON 23:30 Short Cuts (b07lg0mg)
Series 9, Field Guides

The lessons about love and life that we can learn from a fig, a walk in the woods and a connection to a lost love found in the water. Josie Long ventures outdoors, hearing stories of how human hearts become tangled in the forests, lakes and skylines of the natural world.

Series Producer: Eleanor McDowall
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4.


TUESDAY 23 AUGUST 2016

TUE 00:00 Midnight News (b07pd4n1)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.

TUE 00:30 Book of the Week (b07pf1bb)
[Repeat of broadcast at 09:45 on Monday]

TUE 00:48 Shipping Forecast (b07pd4n3)
The latest shipping forecast.

TUE 01:00 Selection of BBC World Service Programmes (b07pd4n5)
BBC Radio 4 joins the BBC World Service.

TUE 05:20 Shipping Forecast (b07pd4n7)
The latest shipping forecast.

TUE 05:30 News Briefing (b07pd4n9)
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.

TUE 05:43 Prayer for the Day (b07r28hg)
A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Shaunaka Rishi Das, Director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.

TUE 05:45 Farming Today (b07pd4nc)
The latest news about food, farming and the countryside. Presented by Sybil Ruscoe and produced by Beatrice Fenton.

TUE 05:58 Tweet of the Day (b038qkb3)
Aquatic Warbler

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs.

Brett Westwood presents the aquatic warbler. The stripy aquatic warbler is streaked like the sedges it lives in and is the only globally threatened European perching bird. They sing in the marshes of central and eastern Europe where the small European population has its stronghold. Unfortunately, this specialized habitat is disappearing because of drainage, disturbance and peat extraction. They are migrants so it's vital to protect their wintering areas as well as their breeding sites. It's known that up to 10,000 birds winter in the swamps of North-west Senegal.

TUE 06:00 Today (b07r1qh0)
Morning news and current affairs. Including Sports Desk, Weather and Thought for the Day.

TUE 09:00 Reflections with Peter Hennessy (b07pgvjg)
Series 4, Kenneth Baker

Peter Hennessy, the historian of modern Britain, asks senior politicians to reflect on their life and times. Each week, he invites his guest to explore their early, formative influences, their experience of events and their impressions of the people they've known.
In this programme, Kenneth Baker, now Lord Baker of Dorking, the former Cabinet Minister in the Thatcher and Major Governments, and author of books on political cartoons, discusses his background and career. He first entered Parliament in 1968 at a by-election, and despite losing his seat in the 1970 election, he soon returned to the Commons and became a minister in the Heath Government. His role as Heath's parliamentary aide damaged his prospects when Thatcher became Conservative leader in 1975, but his business experience prompted him to write a policy paper on new technology, and in early 1981, he was appointed Minister for Information Technology.
Thatcher promoted Baker to her Cabinet in 1985 as Environment Secretary, and in 1986 he became Education Secretary, where he introduced the national curriculum and training for teachers (the 'Baker Days'). As Conservative Party Chairman in 1990, he deflected criticism of the party's poor showing in local elections by highlighting good results in Wandsworth and Westminster. He served as Home Secretary in John Major's Cabinet until 1992, but left office after the 1992 election and in 1997 stood down as an MP. He now sits in the House of Lords and continues to promote technical education. He takes a keen interest in poetry and satire, and despite his portrayal as a slug in the television series, 'Spitting Image', he retains his enthusiasm for caricature and cartoons.

Producer: Rob Shepherd.

TUE 09:45 Book of the Week (b07q3btt)
Wish Lanterns, Episode 2

Dahai is a military child and a netizen, Fred is a daughter of the Party, Snail the son of struggling farmers, and Xiaoxiao grew up in the far north and longed to travel south. All were infants when the tanks rolled through Beijing in 1989 and none really know much about their country's recent past. In today's episode they endure the rigours of the Chinese education system and the pressure to get the exam grades which lead to college.

There are approximately 322 million Chinese aged between 16 and 30 - a group larger than the population of the USA - and they are destined to have an unprecedented influence on global affairs in the coming years.

Written by Alec Ash
Read by David Seddon
Abridged and Produced by Jill Waters
A Waters Company production for BBC Radio 4.

TUE 10:00 Woman's Hour (b07pd4nf)
Programme that offers a female perspective on the world.

TUE 10:45 15 Minute Drama (b07pgvjj)
Blood and Milk, Episode 2

by Gregory Evans

As young Welsh woman Megan Evans begins to learn about the family's dairy business and life in 1890s Whitechapel she also begins to suspect that her brother is hiding something.

Directed by Marc Beeby.

TUE 11:00 Natural Histories (b07pgvjl)
Camel

Brett Westwood follows the route trodden by the camel, from being a revered subject of Arabic eulogies to being reviled by Europeans - and now being ridden by tiny robot jockeys.

TUE 11:30 Sweet Mother KD (b07pgvjn)
Laura Barton sorts through myth and misdirection to tell the story of Karen Dalton, the folk world's answer to Billie Holiday.

Karen Dalton was a mesmerising singer, the queen of Greenwich Village. Playing 12-string guitar or long-neck banjo, she sang blues, folk, country, pop, Motown - re-making each song in her own inimitable, heartbreaking style. She was never known as a songwriter in her lifetime, but rather as an interpreter of other people's songs. Dalton's sometime harmonica player Bob Dylan wrote in his memoir, "my favourite singer was Karen Dalton... she had a voice like Billie Holiday's and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it."

She went all the way with it. Karen Dalton went so far that it seems not many people were prepared to follow and her life story is peppered with gaps and sadness, a catalogue of tall tales left in her wake. She was married and divorced twice, with two children, while still in her teens. Some say she was half-Cherokee, that she kidnapped one of her own children and ran away to New York City. Some say that she had to be tricked into recording her first album, and that her missing teeth came at the hands of a jealous lover. Some say she was homeless, penniless and that she died of AIDS on the New York streets. That particular detail happens not to be true, but what is certain is that she was a powerful singer and performer who - whether through disinterest on her part, lousy timing, bad luck or bad habits - never really realised her potential.

The mysteries that surround her life may be part of the reason for a recent resurgence of interest in Karen Dalton. In the last few years, several CDs of reissued and previously unreleased material have appeared.

But there's been another, more illuminating, if bitter-sweet, reinvention as well.

After Karen Dalton's death, her papers came into the possession of her friend Peter Walker. Contained in these folders, among the transcriptions of traditional songs, mementoes, doodles and fragments, are a number of original poems and songs that shed a new light on a performer previously only known for giving heart-breaking voice to other people's material.

Featuring Sharon Van Etten, Dan Hankin, Josh Rosenthal, Peter Stampfel and Peter Walker.

More information about the Remembering Mountains project here: http://www.tompkinssquare.com/

Producer: Martin Williams.

TUE 12:00 News Summary (b07pd4nh)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.

TUE 12:04 Home Front (b07kcj3w)
23 August 1916 - Alec Poole

On this day in 1916, the British army gained 200 yards just south of Thiepval, and the Reverend Alec Poole has a complicated day.

Written by Katie Hims
Directed by Jessica Dromgoole.

TUE 12:15 You and Yours (b07pd4nm)
Call You and Yours

Consumer phone-in.

TUE 12:57 Weather (b07pd4np)
The latest weather forecast.

TUE 13:00 World at One (b07pd4nr)
Analysis of news and current affairs.

TUE 13:45 Unforgettable (b07pgvjq)
Tony Garnett/Mary Whitehouse

Filmmaker Tony Garnett has an imagined conversation with the late Mary Whitehouse. Using archive clips, they are reunited in one final debate across the political and moral divide.

Tony Garnett's productions include Cathy Come Home, Kes and This Life. He has made films investigating police corruption, and advocating abortion law reform and the abolition of the death penalty. Mary Whitehouse, alarmed at the rapid social changes of the 1960s, waged crusades against 'the permissive society' and criticised the BBC for portraying 'promiscuity as normal'.

Although diametrically opposed to her ethics and opinions, Garnett reveals a respect for Whitehouse's courage. As the conversation develops, he re-evaluates the effectiveness of his own attempts to influence public opinion, and the successes and failures of Mary Whitehouse's moral and political campaigns in the years since her death in 2001.

In 1991 Natalie Cole sang a duet with her long dead father, Nat King Cole - the result was Unforgettable. This is the radio equivalent. In each edition of the series, a different guest is invited to interact with someone, now dead, with whom they have, or have wanted to have, a connection. Using technology designed for musicians and DJs to spontaneously play out short musical clips, producer Adam Fowler facilitates a real-time conversation between the two participants, using conversational snippets of the deceased from past recordings.

The guest has no advance knowledge of the excerpts, and the conversation can take unexpected turns, occasionally leading to some emotionally charged interchanges, as living voices engage with those preserved in the archive.

Research: Philippa Geering
Producer: Adam Fowler
An Overtone production for BBC Radio 4.

TUE 14:00 The Archers (b07pfc3b)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:00 on Monday]

TUE 14:15 Tracks (b07pgvjs)
The Pineal Gland

The third in a major new nine-part conspiracy thriller, starring Romola Garai. Written by Matthew Broughton.

Following a mysterious phone call, the crash of Flight 259 is declared an accident. Nothing makes sense anymore. And, as Helen continues investigating Florian's fellow passengers, she uncovers another disturbing medical mystery.

Is Florian somehow to blame for everything? And will Helen be able to find her father before someone more dangerous does?

Tracks: A story in nine parts about life, death and the human brain.

Original music by Stu Barker

Directed in Wales by Helen Perry.

TUE 15:00 Making History (b07pgvjv)
Tom Holland is joined by Dr Lucy Robinson from the University of Sussex to consider jazz in the trenches, woad and the women behind the Notting Hill Carnival.

Helen Castor meets Dr Michael Hammond, Associate Professor at the University of Southampton, to hear about Blues in the Trenches. Dr Hammond argues that 'the blues' as a musical tradition was brought to the trenches of the Great War by African-American soldiers from all parts of the US and they shared different performance styles and traditions - creating cross-pollinations that foreshadow the country blues recordings of the 1920s and 30s by Charley Patton, Furry Lewis, Bukka White, Geechie Wiley, Ma Rainey, Elvey Thomas, Blind Willie Johnson and notable others.

Closer to home, on the banks of the River Thames, Iszi Lawrence traces the origins of today's craze for tattoos and body art back to the Celts, when she learns to make woad.

On the eve of the Notting Hill Carnival, comic Ava Vidal nominates the activist, feminist, socialist and founder of the Carnival Claudia Jones for the Making History plinth.

Producer: Nick Patrick
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

TUE 15:30 Recycled Radio (b06j2fpn)
Series 4, The Countryside

Radio 4's alternative take on the sound archive in the company of Gerald Scarfe. This week, we take a twisting, scenic route through the great British countryside.
Producer: Chris Ledgard.

TUE 16:00 The Truth about Children Who Lie (b07pgvjx)
Psychotherapist Philippa Perry delves into the world of childhood deception to discover when and why children lie. Are we all born liars? What role do parents and school play in developing our ability to lie? When and why can it become problem behaviour?

Philippa speaks to author Ian Leslie who believes that a child's first lie is a cause for celebration. On the other hand, neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris deplores all types of lies - even tiny white ones - and tells his children the unvarnished truth about almost everything. Even at Christmas.

We meet a group of excitable seven year olds who describe with great gusto their experiences of lying and being lied to. As Philippa observes, children receive very mixed messages from parents - on the one hand they're told not to lie but then they witness their parents lying all the time, often without even realising it. Similarly, she asks TV critic and mum Julia Raeside if television, particularly soaps, might be normalising lying.

Philippa tracks down Margaret Connell, former headmistress of her daughter's secondary school, to discuss the life-changing advice about lying that Margaret gave to parents on the first day of term. Margaret believes that parents put too much weight on truth-telling and teenagers often feel pushed into an impossible situation. Students from Haringey Sixth Form College also explain why they feel it necessary to lie to teachers, parents and fellow classmates.

We also hear about pioneering experiments by Dr Victoria Talwar of McGill University, Canada, which are increasing our understanding of how children develop their capacity to lie and the best ways for adults to foster their honesty.

Producers: Victoria Ferran and Susan Marling
A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 4.

TUE 16:30 Great Lives (b07pgvjz)
Series 40, Dag Hammarskjold

Sometime around midnight of September 17 1961, a plane approached an airstrip near Ndola in what was then northern Rhodesia. The plane was a DC6, and on board the second ever secretary general of the United Nations, an aristocratic Swede called Dag Hammarskjold. He was on his way to try and mediate a war in the Congo, but the plane crashed and Hammarskjold was killed.

Was it an accident? The debate continues to this day.

Joining Matthew Parris to discuss the life and death of Hammarskjold are the journalist Georgina Godwin and the academic Susan Williams, author of Who Killed Hammarskjold? A dramatic and detailed discussion focuses on the events surrounding his death.

The producer in Bristol is Miles Warde.

TUE 17:00 PM (b07pd4nt)
Eddie Mair with interviews, context and analysis.

TUE 18:00 Six O'Clock News (b07pd4nw)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.

TUE 18:30 Mark Watson Talks a Bit About Life (b07pgw3h)
Series 2, Episode 1

New series from multi-award winning Mark Watson. Assisted and impeded in equal measure by henchmen Sam Simmons and Will Adamsdale, he revives his quest to make some sort of sense of life, against the backdrop of a world that, in recent times, has come to seem even more peculiar than usual.

The tenacious trio take on some of human life's central topics - family, spirituality, Scandinavia. Watson peddles his unique, high-octane stand-up while Simmons and Adamsdale chip in with interjections which include (but are not limited to) music, shopping lists, life advice, stunts, avant-garde offerings and divvy interactions.

Expect big laughs, controlled chaos and an attempt to answer the one question none of us can quite escape from - what exactly is going on?

This week, Watson and his team consider work and play. How can we find the right balance between them? Do we get more out of life from flogging ourselves at the coalface, or messing about at the coalface, or do we not even have to go to the coalface at all?

Mark Watson is a multi-award winning comedian, including the inaugural If.Comedy Panel Prize 2006. He is assisted by Sam Simmons, winner of the Fosters Edinburgh Comedy Award 2015 and Will Adamsdale who won the the Perrier Comedy Award in 2004.

Produced by Lianne Coop
An Impatient production for BBC Radio 4.

TUE 19:00 The Archers (b07pj1dr)
Eddie is teaching George a Grundy tradition, while Joe lays it on thick with Oliver.

TUE 19:15 Front Row (b07pd4ny)
Arts news, interviews and reviews.

TUE 19:45 15 Minute Drama (b07pgvjj)
[Repeat of broadcast at 10:45 today]

TUE 20:00 How We Voted Brexit (b07pgw3k)
The EU Referendum is the biggest democratic decision Britain has faced in a generation - but how were voters swayed into choosing Remain or Leave?

Anne McElvoy speaks to leading figures from across the campaigns to reveal some of the strategic decisions made on the campaign trail, which ultimately led to the momentous result.

Producer: Richard Fenton-Smith
Researcher: Beth Sagar-Fenton.

TUE 20:40 In Touch (b07pd4p0)
News, views and information for people who are blind or partially sighted.

TUE 21:00 Why Become a Doctor? (b07pgw3m)
The Juniors' Contract

In the second programme in the series we look in more detail at the work and training of junior doctors today. The industrial dispute over contracts - which led to strike action - has now been going on for two years, We look at the workloads of junior doctors today, and examine the conflict between the amount of time available to spend on medicine versus that spent on administration, paperwork and form filling, the record keeping now required.
While there is no doubt medicine has advanced dramatically in recent years , the nature of the job for those delivering it has also changed, with a move to evidence based medicine and less reliance on passing down knowledge through the generations. For many in training this has led to a feeling of isolation, and a loss of support structures through separation from experienced colleagues.
We also ask what greater focus on the wishes of patients means for the delivery of treatment, here looking at the conflicts between the need to see many patients in a short time period and yet provide them with full and rounded care.

TUE 21:30 Reflections with Peter Hennessy (b07pgvjg)
[Repeat of broadcast at 09:00 today]

TUE 21:58 Weather (b07pd4p2)
The latest weather forecast.

TUE 22:00 The World Tonight (b07pd4p4)
In-depth reporting and analysis from a global perspective.

TUE 22:45 Book at Bedtime (b07pgw3p)
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, Episode 7

Nearly 30 years on from its original publication, Hilary Mantel's third novel is still as disturbing, incisive and illuminating as ever. In an unusual collaboration, the author has revisited the book to create, with the abridger, this new ten-part serialisation.

Frances Shore is a cartographer by trade, but when her husband's work takes them to Saudi Arabia she finds herself unable to map either the ever changing landscape or the Kingdom's heavily veiled ways of working. The regime is corrupt and harsh, the expatriates are hard-drinking money-grubbers, and her Muslim neighbours are secretive and watchful.

She soon discovers that the streets are not a woman's territory. Confined in her flat, she finds her sense of self beginning to dissolve. She hears footsteps, sounds of distress from the supposedly empty flat above. She has only constantly changing rumours to hang on to, and no one with whom to share her creeping unease.

In episode seven, Yasmin confides in Frances.

Reader: Anna Maxwell Martin
Author: Hilary Mantel
Abridger: Sara Davies
Producer: Alexa Moore
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

TUE 23:00 Couples (b05mrdn9)
Episode 1

New semi-improvised comedy show written and performed by Julia Davis and Marc Wootton. The duo portray a series of couples, all in therapy with the renowned therapist Dr Tanya Ray-Harding, played by Vicki Pepperdine.

In the first episode, Dr Tanya meets theatre director Brian and his unhappy actress wife Kirsten.

Written and Performed by Julia Davis and Marc Wootton.
With Vicki Pepperdine.

Produced by Ashley Blaker
A Black Hat production for BBC Radio 4.

TUE 23:30 Alvin Hall Goes Back to School (b07pgw51)
Programme following financial guru Alvin Hall as he returns to his Florida hometown after being away for more than a decade.


WEDNESDAY 24 AUGUST 2016

WED 00:00 Midnight News (b07pd4r4)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.

WED 00:30 Book of the Week (b07q3btt)
[Repeat of broadcast at 09:45 on Tuesday]

WED 00:48 Shipping Forecast (b07pd4r6)
The latest shipping forecast.

WED 01:00 Selection of BBC World Service Programmes (b07pd4r8)
BBC Radio 4 joins the BBC World Service.

WED 05:20 Shipping Forecast (b07pd4rb)
The latest shipping forecast.

WED 05:30 News Briefing (b07pd4rd)
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.

WED 05:43 Prayer for the Day (b07r2ckb)
A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Shaunaka Rishi Das, Director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.

WED 05:45 Farming Today (b07pd4rg)
The latest news about food, farming and the countryside. Presented by Anna Hill and produced by Beatrice Fenton.

WED 05:58 Tweet of the Day (b038qk8r)
Thrush Nightingale

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs.

Brett Westwood presents the thrush nightingale. Even though there's no sign of the whistling crescendos that are a hallmark of its close relative, the Nightingale, the song of the thrush nightingale is an accomplished performance. They are summer visitors to Europe and prefer dense damp thickets from which they often sing.

WED 06:00 Today (b07r2ckd)
Morning news and current affairs. Including Sports Desk, Weather and Thought for the Day.

WED 09:00 What's the Point of...? (b07pgwfz)
Series 8, The London Black Cab

Black cabs are as much a part of London's heritage as Big Ben, Beefeaters and double-decker buses. They trace their lineage back to Oliver Cromwell. But the black cab industry is under threat. The number of private hire vehicles in London has doubled in the last ten years. Sat-nav is Uber alles. Driverless cars are just round the corner. Can Black cabs keep up with the technology or will they go the way of the red telephone box?
Quentin Letts considers the point and the future of the black cab.
Producer: Rosie Dawson.

WED 09:30 Prime Ministers' Props (b07pgwg1)
Anthony Eden's Homburg Hat

Professor Sir David Cannadine explores political fame and image by looking at how an object or prop, whether chosen deliberately or otherwise, can come to define a political leader - from Winston Churchill's cigar and siren suit to Margaret Thatcher's handbag.

Sir David looks at the significance of these props of power - what they mean and what they become, and what happens when, almost inevitably, Prime Ministers lose control of their image and their props take on a hostile meaning, very different from their original intentions.

Anthony Eden was one of the briefest serving Prime Ministers of modern times, and his name became inseparably linked with the Suez fiasco of 1956, from which his reputation has never recovered. But in the earlier stages of his political career, Eden was widely regarded as the most attractive and glamorous figure in British public life. These qualities were both proclaimed and symbolised by his Homburg hat, which he briefly made fashionable when it became known as the Eden on Savile Row. In fact, Anthony Eden is the only British Prime Minister, apart from the Duke of Wellington, to have had an item of apparel named after him.

But with Eden's fall from grace, the Eden hat was quickly forgotten and one biographer wrote scathingly in the 1960s, "who wears an Anthony Eden hat today?"

And while we still use the phrase Wellington boot, and remember the victor of Waterloo, the Eden Homburg, and the man who gave his name to it, have both been largely forgotten.

A Blakeway production for BBC Radio 4.

WED 09:45 Book of the Week (b07q3c6h)
Wish Lanterns, Episode 3

Alec Ash charts the stories of young Chinese lives, particularly those young people born under the one-child policy of the 1980s, as they seek to negotiate the expectations of those around them and their own inner desires for self-fulfilment.

Dahai is a child of the military who grew up in a compound, Fred is a pampered daughter of the Party, Xiaoxiao grew up in the far north where her parents ran a fruit wholesalers, and Snail comes from a farming family and is the son of a rural migrant worker. All were infants when the tanks rolled through Beijing in 1989 and none really know much about their country's recent past. But the way China develops in the future is very much something that will affect their lives - and their behaviour and decisions will affect ours.

In today's episode, the search for more to life than the treadmill of exams and finding a job. These young Chinese seek meaning in other realms - hipster fads, star signs, online gaming and religion.

Alec Ash moved to Beijing in 2008 and speaks Mandarin, he too is of the 80s generation.

Written by Alec Ash
Read by David Seddon
Abridged and Produced by Jill Waters
A Waters Company production for BBC Radio 4.

WED 10:00 Woman's Hour (b07pd4rj)
Programme that offers a female perspective on the world.

WED 10:41 15 Minute Drama (b07pgwg3)
Blood and Milk, Episode 3

by Gregory Evans

Thriller set in 1890s Whitechapel. Meg makes some unpleasant discoveries about the family's dairy business and her brother reveals a devastating secret.

Directed by Marc Beeby.

WED 10:55 The Listening Project (b06myl7d)
Gareth and Leon - Not Perfect

Fi Glover introduces a conversation between a disabled father and his ten year old son about how they deal with the impact his disability has on their relationship; another conversation in the series that proves it's surprising what you hear when you listen.

The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they've never discussed intimately before. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation - they're not BBC interviews, and that's an important difference - lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Most of the unedited conversations are being archived by the British Library and used to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium. You can learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject

Producer: Marya Burgess.

WED 11:00 Leonard and Marianne (b00csph9)
In 1960, on the Greek island of Hydra, a young Canadian poet on a state scholarship, Leonard Cohen, met Marianne Ihlen, the beautiful wife of a Norwegian novelist. The story of their romance, following her husband's desertion of her, and their eventual separation are immortalised in one of Cohen's earliest and best known songs, So Long, Marianne.

Forty-five years later, Cohen talked to Norwegian Radio about the song and then, in 2008, Marianne spoke for the first time in English about her role as 'muse'. With Marianne's death at the end of July, this is another opportunity to hear the story of their shared love, the passing of the years and their dearly-held memories.

Produced by Alan Hall (with thanks to NRK)
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4.

WED 11:30 Josh Howie's Losing It (b07pgwp0)
The Announcement

A new sitcom in which stand-up comic Josh comes to terms with the impending birth of his first child.

In episode one, Josh and his wife Monique attend a family funeral where Josh manages to fall out with everyone and spectacularly fails to keep the news of the pregnancy under wraps.

Written by Josh Howie

Produced by Ashley Blaker
A Black Hat production for BBC Radio 4.

WED 12:00 News Summary (b07pd4rl)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.

WED 12:04 Home Front (b07kcj49)
24 August 1916 - Hilary Pearce

On this day in 1916, following zeppelin raids on the South East coast, Hilary Pearce is all set to go to war.

Written by Katie Hims
Directed by Jessica Dromgoole.

WED 12:15 You and Yours (b07pd4rq)
Consumer affairs programme.

WED 12:57 Weather (b07pd4rs)
The latest weather forecast.

WED 13:00 World at One (b07pd4rv)
Analysis of news and current affairs.

WED 13:45 Unforgettable (b07pj1dp)
Colin Johnson/Maya Angelou

Colin Johnson has an imagined conversation with his late Grandmother, Maya Angelou, and asks for her blessing on the many ways in which he seeks to continue her legacy.

Angelou's faith, her intellect and her boundless love envelop Johnson as he reminisces with her about family and professional life. His obvious affection and respect for his Grandmother add an intimate dimension to our knowledge of a public figure who died as recently as 2014. And Maya Angelou has some words of advice for her Grandson, spoken from the archive but affecting Colin as if she was there in person.

In 1991 Natalie Cole sang a duet with her long dead father, Nat King Cole - the result was Unforgettable. This is the radio equivalent. In each edition of the series, a different guest is invited to interact with someone, now dead, with whom they have, or have wanted to have, a connection. Using technology designed for musicians and DJs to spontaneously play out short musical clips, producer Adam Fowler facilitates a real-time conversation between the two participants, using conversational snippets of the deceased from past recordings.

The guest has no advance knowledge of the excerpts, and the conversation can take unexpected turns, occasionally leading to some emotionally charged interchanges, as living voices engage with those preserved in the archive.

Research: Philippa Geering
Producer: Adam Fowler
An Overtone production for BBC Radio 4.

WED 14:00 The Archers (b07pj1dr)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:00 on Tuesday]

WED 14:15 Drama (b07pj1dt)
On the Road Not Taken

When he was a teenager, Paul dreamed of heading out on the road with a guitar and head full of songs. But it was far too scary, so he got a proper job instead. Now, thirty years on, he's picked up his guitar again and is determined to live the dream.

Along the way, he takes a side trip back in time through a 1970s childhood. He relives the agony and ecstasy of learning the guitar and doing gigs in old people's homes and youth clubs, as well as confronting the truth about what made it all fall apart.

Then he strides out onto a stage, in front of 500 people, and prepares to sing live for the first time in more than three decades.

Paul Dodgson is a writer and composer. He has previously written two acclaimed autobiographical dramas for BBC Radio 4 (You Drive Me Crazy and Home).

The mandolin was played by Fred Gregory Davies.
The Gurt Lush Choir sang Moon River, by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, arranged by Wendy Sergeant.

Sound by David Thomas

Produced and directed by Kate McAll
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

WED 15:00 Your Money and Your Life (b07pd34k)
[Repeat of broadcast at 12:04 on Saturday]

WED 15:30 Science Stories (b07bdg6b)
Series 3, Florence Nightingale: Statistician

Naomi Alderman tells a little-known story about a rather well-known nurse. Florence Nightingale is famous for mopping the brows of sick and wounded soldiers during the Crimean war. Generations of Nightingale Nurses are named after her. But according to her sister Parthenope: 'she was a shocking nurse'. She was the lady of the lamp but the light she cast wasn't the light of the nurse's lantern; it was the light of statistics. This is the story of Florence Nightingale, the intellectual pioneer and revered statistician.

WED 16:00 Swansong (b076b35d)
Her heart it played
like well worn strings;
in her eyes
the sadness sings;
of one who was destined
for better things

Hana Walker-Brown's grandma was kept alive for seven hours in order for her family to rush to the hospital to say their goodbyes. One moment, alive like few 86 year olds; the next, parked in the one-way ward, a holding bay between this life and the next.

Swansong is a meditation on memory and loss, acceptance and death, with real life stories, imagined ones and the sounds and silences that weave our worlds together.

As Hana sat with her family waiting for the final moment, grief already upon them, her grandma lay in her own time and place - memories flooding in and around the reality of her situation, like a rolodex, flicking through years, moments, experiences in which she'd found happiness, sadness, weakness and strength. Content with death, after a life well-lived.

Comprising interviews with those who witnessed these final moments and audio captured by Hana with her grandma over the years, this feature blurs the lines between fact and fiction to take the listener through the precious final moments before passing to the other side.

Produced by Hana Walker-Brown
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4.

WED 16:30 The Media Show (b07pd4rx)
Topical programme about the fast-changing media world.

WED 17:00 PM (b07pd4rz)
Eddie Mair with interviews, context and analysis.

WED 18:00 Six O'Clock News (b07pd4s1)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.

WED 18:30 To Hull and Back (b07pj1dw)
Series 2, Is That You Mr Brown?

Lucy Beaumont stars as the daughter trying to escape her overbearing mother played by Maureen Lipman in the second series of this warm hearted sitcom set in Hull.

"It's like a cross between a Victoria Wood Sketch and a Mike Leigh film". Radio Times

Episode 3 - Is That You Mr Brown?

An elderly Mrs Chiltern comes to stay after her cat goes missing. Sophie tries to get some bits and pieces together to sell, to pay for a car, her mother buys an antique crystal ball and attempts to tell the fortune of a neighbour with piles.

..... Lucy Beaumont
Producer ..... Carl Cooper
Production Co-ordinator ..... Sophie Richardson

This is a BBC Studios Production.

WED 19:00 The Archers (b07pj1dy)
Will has a culprit in his sights, and Elizabeth does not seem to be getting anywhere.

WED 19:15 Front Row (b07pd4s3)
Arts news, interviews and reviews.

WED 19:45 15 Minute Drama (b07pgwg3)
[Repeat of broadcast at 10:41 today]

WED 20:00 What Point Prison? The Debate (b07pj2pk)
Stephen Sackur chairs a debate about the role of prison in the 21st century, at the Galleries of Justice Museum in Nottingham.

Is incarceration still fit for purpose in a digital age? Are there other ways to punish and rehabilitate people? Or, despite a rising prison population and major overcrowding, are we simply not tough enough? Should we instead be building more jails and sending out a clear message to would-be criminals?

The Chief Inspector of Prisons in England and Wales, Peter Clarke said recently that our prisons had become "unacceptably violent and dangerous places" and that the spread of psychoactive substances, often referred to as legal highs, was a having a "dramatic and destabilising effect".

How we treat the people we put behind bars is an age old debate, but it's also one facing new challenges - from technological change to concerns about cost.

Stephen Sackur hears from decision makers, experts and an invited audience with direct experience of prison and criminal justice. He asks which - if any of the alternatives to prison used in other parts of the world should be considered in the UK. From house arrest and boot camps to naming and shaming and diversion, how effective would they be here?


Produced by Ashley Byrne
A Made in Manchester production for BBC Radio 4.

WED 20:45 Four Thought (b07pj2pn)
Father and Son

Laurence Anholt describes how his dying father revealed the traumatic experiences of his early life, explaining his failure to be a loving parent to his son.

"I recalled the nightmares and mood swings he had suffered when I was young, and I began to realise that for most of his life, my father had suffered from acute untreated trauma."

Producer: Sheila Cook.

WED 21:00 The Inflamed Mind (b07pj2pw)
BBC health reporter James Gallagher explores the increasing body of evidence that a dysfunctional immune system is responsible for the depression or psychotic illness experienced by many thousands of people in the UK. James talks to the psychiatrists investigating this new understanding of mental illness and to people who may benefit from new and old treatments aimed at their immune cells rather than their brain cells.

"I believe this is one of the strongest discoveries in psychiatry in the last twenty years", says Professor Carmine B of the his and other research on the immune system and depression. " It allows us to understand depression no longer as just a disorder of the mind and not even a disorder of the brain, but a disorder of the whole body. It shifts conceptually what we understand about depression."

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.

WED 21:30 What's the Point of...? (b07pgwfz)
[Repeat of broadcast at 09:00 today]

WED 21:58 Weather (b07pd4s5)
The latest weather forecast.

WED 22:00 The World Tonight (b07pd4s7)
In-depth reporting and analysis from a global perspective.

WED 22:45 Book at Bedtime (b07pj2py)
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, Episode 8

Nearly 30 years on from its original publication, Hilary Mantel's third novel is still as disturbing, incisive and illuminating as ever. In an unusual collaboration, the author has revisited the book to create, with the abridger, this new ten-part serialisation.

Frances Shore is a cartographer by trade, but when her husband's work takes them to Saudi Arabia she finds herself unable to map either the ever changing landscape or the Kingdom's heavily veiled ways of working. The regime is corrupt and harsh, the expatriates are hard-drinking money-grubbers, and her Muslim neighbours are secretive and watchful.

She soon discovers that the streets are not a woman's territory. Confined in her flat, she finds her sense of self beginning to dissolve. She hears footsteps, sounds of distress from the supposedly empty flat above. She has only constantly changing rumours to hang on to, and no one with whom to share her creeping unease.

In episode eight, Frances' suspicions about the empty flat grow.

Reader: Anna Maxwell Martin
Author: Hilary Mantel
Abridger: Sara Davies
Producer: Alexa Moore
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

WED 23:00 Angela Barnes: You Can't Take It with You (b07pj2q0)
Episode 3

Super-sharp everywoman Angela Barnes tackles life and love - and, with the help of an audience, packs herself a fantasy coffin.

Remembering her larger-than-life father - a gregarious character, sex shop manager, naturist, and a big fan of caravans and pranks - Angela celebrates his 'carpe diem' approach to life, and his favourite motto, You Can't Take It With You.

When her father died very suddenly in 2008, Angela and her family proved him wrong and stuffed his coffin with sentimental keepsakes for his final journey.

In this series, Angela does the very same thing and asks her loved ones to nominate objects that they would choose to send on with her as mementoes of their time together, which she keeps in a suitcase full of memories, acting as prompts for contemplative, heart-warming and captivating comedy.

Angela Barnes is a vivacious, critically acclaimed stand-up comic from Maidstone, Kent. After a career in health and social care, at aged 33 she decided to pursue a long held ambition and give comedy a go. Within a couple of years, Angela and her witty worldview had won the 2011 BBC New Comedy Award by a public vote, secured a weekly star slot in Channel 4's Stand Up For The Week and appeared on numerous radio and television shows including Loose Ends, The Now Show and writing credits on her beloved The News Quiz (BBC Radio 4), Russell Kane's Whistle Stop Tour (BBC Radio 2), Mock The Week (BBC 2) and Russell Howard's Good News (BBC 3).

An Impatient production for BBC Radio 4.

WED 23:15 Tez Talks (b07pj2v3)
Community

Breakthrough comedian Tez Ilyas presents a show for everyone interested in - or interested in becoming - a British Muslim. Everything you need to know is here - the do's, don'ts, and avoid-or-you'll-be-arresteds. Simultaneously a hilarious, joyous celebration of British-Muslim life - and a subversive, thoughtful satire on society's attitudes to Islam.

In this episode, Tez looks at 'Community'. It seems from the news, all Muslims belong to the 'Muslim Community' - but what is this mysterious organisation? Who runs it? What does it do? And does Nadiya from Bake Off speak for them all? Tez gets to the bottom of it...

About Tez
Blackburn-born Tez Ilyas started performing comedy in 2010 and has appeared in eight competition finals including the BBC New Comedy Award and Leicester Mercury New Comedian of the Year. He has recently appeared on the Now Show on Radio 4, as well as having performances on BBC1, BBC 3, E4, and BBC iPlayer, following his hugely critically-acclaimed debut Edinburgh show.

Producer: Sam Bryant
A BBC Studios Production.

WED 23:30 Shared Experience (b06ptylr)
Series 4, Living with Addiction

People who are being treated for an addiction receive the support of professional organisations as well as family and friends. Many of them say they could not have beaten it without their partner's help. But who recognises the role of close family members in getting an addict through tough times? Fi Glover hears from three people living with partners in various stages of addiction about how they have coped.

Producer: Maggie Ayre.


THURSDAY 25 AUGUST 2016

THU 00:00 Midnight News (b07pd4v5)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.

THU 00:30 Book of the Week (b07q3c6h)
[Repeat of broadcast at 09:45 on Wednesday]

THU 00:48 Shipping Forecast (b07pd4v7)
The latest shipping forecast.

THU 01:00 Selection of BBC World Service Programmes (b07pd4v9)
BBC Radio 4 joins the BBC World Service.

THU 05:20 Shipping Forecast (b07pd4vc)
The latest shipping forecast.

THU 05:30 News Briefing (b07pd4vf)
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.

THU 05:43 Prayer for the Day (b07r32yq)
A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Shaunaka Rishi Das, Director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.

THU 05:45 Farming Today (b07pd4vh)
The latest news about food, farming and the countryside. Presented by Felicity Evans and produced by Sally Challoner.

THU 05:58 Tweet of the Day (b03bkdkt)
Ortolan Bunting

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about the British birds inspired by their calls and songs.

Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Ortolan Bunting. Ortolan Buntings are smart relatives of our yellowhammer. They're migrants which winter in Africa and small numbers of birds heading south for the winter may turn up on our coasts in autumn. But until recently in parts of southern Europe, their arrival was welcomed by hunters with nets.

The sound archive recording of the ortolan bunting featured in this programme was sourced from:
Volker Arnold, XC139765. Accessible at www.xeno-canto.org/139765.

THU 06:00 Today (b07q3cq0)
Morning news and current affairs. Including Sports Desk, Weather and Thought for the Day.

THU 09:00 The Listening Project (b07pj81y)
Listening Project Live from Swansea

As The Listening Project mobile Booth nears the end of its summer tour, it plays host to Fi Glover and guests to reflect on the Welsh relationship with language and literature.

The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they've never discussed intimately before. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation - they're not BBC interviews, and that's an important difference - lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Most of the unedited conversations are being archived by the British Library and used to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium. You can learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject

Producer: Marya Burgess.

THU 09:30 Natural History Heroes (b06d2g97)
Edward Tyson

Edward Tyson, a physician and scientist, is regarded as the father of the study of comparative anatomy. Tyson was one of an early group of scientists who started to look inside animals in order to understand them and therefore learn more about ourselves. In a time before the category 'mammal' even was recognised Tyson's anatomy of a porpoise described an animal more similar to a pig than a fish without resorting to mythical explanations for this incongruity. Later Tyson was the first to note that a chimpanzee is physically more in akin to a human than to a monkey. These observations were only made possible due to Tyson's incredible dissection skills and knowledge of anatomy. Richard Sabin curator of large mammals at the Natural History Museum explains why Edward Tyson is his Natural History Hero.

THU 09:45 Book of the Week (b07q3cq2)
Wish Lanterns, Episode 4

The stories of young Chinese lives, particularly those young people born under the one-child policy of the 1980s, as they seek to negotiate the expectations of those around them and their own inner desires for self-fulfilment.

There are approximately 322 million Chinese aged between 16 and 30 - a group larger than the population of the USA and destined to have an unprecedented influence on global affairs in the coming years. The one-child policy has led to a generation of only children. There is intense competition for education and jobs, and a tug-of-war between cultural change and tradition, nationalism and the lures of the West.

In episode 4, Dahai, Fred, Snail and Xiaoxiao have graduated, now they have to find their own way - a place to live, a job and ultimately a life-partner. The pressure to marry is considerable - on both young men and women.

Alec Ash studied English literature at Oxford University. After graduating he taught in a Tibetan village in western China for a summer, before moving to Beijing in 2008. He speaks Mandarin and has spent a lot of time with the people he writes about, who are like him, children of the 1980s.

Written by Alec Ash
Read by David Seddon
Abridged and Produced by Jill Waters
A Waters Company production for BBC Radio 4.

THU 10:00 Woman's Hour (b07pd4vk)
Programme that offers a female perspective on the world.

THU 10:45 15 Minute Drama (b07pj820)
Blood and Milk, Episode 4

by Gregory Evans

When Meg learns the truth about her brother's involvement with gangster Moses Lipski, she realises that she will have to do something to save both him and the family business.

Directed by Marc Beeby.

THU 11:00 Crossing Continents (b07pj822)
Protesting in Putin's Russia

After the last elections in Russia, mass protests against vote-rigging led to clashes in the centre of Moscow. The events on Bolotnaya Square were the biggest challenge President Putin has ever faced to his rule. Four years on, several demonstrators are still serving long prison sentences, the laws on protesting have been tightened and the arrests continue. As Russia gears up for parliamentary elections in September, Sarah Rainsford talks to some of those caught up in the Bolotnaya protests, and asks what their stories tell us about Putin's Russia today.
Producer: Mark Savage.

THU 11:30 L'origine de L'Origine du monde (b07pj824)
L'Origine du Monde is perhaps the most notorious and explicit painting housed in a public museum.

Gustave Courbet's painting of a woman's genitals, torso, thighs and single breast, but no head, was painted 150 years ago. Its first owner was Khalil Bey a wealthy art collector and diplomat for the Ottoman Empire. Visitors and dinner party guests would be led to his dressing room and towards a green curtain:

"When one draws aside the veil, one remains stupefied to perceive a woman, life-size, seen from the front, moved and convulsed, remarkably executed ... providing the last word in realism".

After Khalil Bey's art collection was sold the painting disappeared for more than a hundred years. It was said to be in the collection of a Hungarian aristocrat, looted by the Germans in the Second World War and possibly somewhere in the United States. In fact, since the 1950s, it had hung in the country house of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, hidden behind a surrealist landscape.

When the painting was acquired by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris in 1995 as payment in lieu of taxes on the Lacan estate, visitors were a little squeamish about looking at it.

In this programme Viv Groskop, a huge admirer of the work, visits the museum to talk to visitors about their responses to the painting now.

She talks to art historians, Segolene Lemen and Lynda Nead, the performance artist Deborah Robertis whose "conversation" with the painting in 2014 caused a scandal, and Patrick Collister who has worked in advertising for more than 25 years, to find out about the painting's history, how it works on the viewer and why it remains one of the most powerfully affecting works of art.

Producer: Natalie Steed
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.

THU 12:00 News Summary (b07pd4vm)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.

THU 12:04 Home Front (b07kcj4g)
25 August 1916 - Kitty Wilson

On this day in 1916, there were more air raids on the East Coast, with 29 casualties, and Kitty discovers that anyone communicating in secret code runs the risk of being labelled a spy.

Written by Katie Hims
Directed by Jessica Dromgoole.

THU 12:15 You and Yours (b07pd4vr)
Consumer affairs programme.

THU 12:57 Weather (b07pd4vt)
The latest weather forecast.

THU 13:00 World at One (b07pd4vw)
Analysis of news and current affairs.

THU 13:45 Unforgettable (b07pj826)
Robbie Stamp/Douglas Adams

Robbie Stamp has an imagined conversation with his late business partner and friend, Douglas Adams.

The last time Robbie talked with Douglas for real was the day before the author's sudden and unexpected death in 2001. He admits to constantly chatting to Douglas in his head since then - but this edition of Unforgettable is the first time he hears Adams respond in his own words.

In a moving interaction between the living and the archive, the subjects range from the new internet, via the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, to the benefits of seeing the world from the point of view of someone else, or even a different species.

Robbie explains how interested Douglas Adams would have been in the technological hardware and software which allows this new conversation to happen, and imagines the fun he would have had with it.

In 1991 Natalie Cole sang a duet with her long dead father, Nat King Cole - the result was Unforgettable. This is the radio equivalent. In each edition of the series, a different guest is invited to interact with someone, now dead, with whom they have, or have wanted to have, a connection. Using technology designed for musicians and DJs to spontaneously play out short musical clips, producer Adam Fowler facilitates a real-time conversation between the two participants, using conversational snippets of the deceased from past recordings.

The guest has no advance knowledge of the excerpts, and the conversation can take unexpected turns, occasionally leading to some emotionally charged interchanges, as living voices engage with those preserved in the archive.

Research: Philippa Geering
Producer: Adam Fowler
An Overtone production for BBC Radio 4.

THU 14:00 The Archers (b07pj1dy)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:00 on Wednesday]

THU 14:15 Afternoon Drama (b047zrkq)
Hatch, Match and Dispatch, Losing My Penny

Hatch, Match and Dispatch: Losing My Penny by Leah Chillery.

A series of linked plays that start in a Register Office and end in either a birth, a marriage or a death.

Leo is in love with Penny and he plans to marry her. It seems that there is only Penny's possessive father in the way. But Leo has secrets of his own.

Director/Producer Gary Brown.

THU 15:00 Open Country (b07pj89s)
Helen Baxendale visits Belper in Derbyshire

Guest presenter Helen Baxendale visits Belper in Derbyshire, to explore the landscape for traces of the town's industrial past. Belper is part of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site (as designated by UNESCO in 2001), so she expected to find the river-power and the ironstone that made the town a perfect site for Jedediah Strutt to locate his mills in the eighteenth century. More surprising is the vibrant artistic scene and a large helping of community spirit whose roots can be traced back over to Strutt.

Helen also explores a nature reserve that bears the scars of industry, with rivers dredged to feed the mills, flood plains damned and built up and a former landfill site that looks as wild as the rest of the reserve. Closer scrutiny suggests that local flora and fauna are less willing to make their home on the former rubbish tip, even though it is entirely covered in soil and vegetation and doesn't appear to leach into the surrounding environment.

Helen Baxendale is an actress best known for her roles in Cuckoo, Cold Feet and Friends. She also has a keen interest in the environment and family roots in Derbyshire.

Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery.

THU 15:27 Radio 4 Appeal (b07pd79g)
[Repeat of broadcast at 07:54 on Sunday]

THU 15:30 Open Book (b07pdd82)
[Repeat of broadcast at 16:00 on Sunday]

THU 16:00 The Film Programme (b07pjb9r)
Save Our Cinemas

With Antonia Quirke.

Antonia meets two groups who are trying to save their local cinemas in Deptford and Homerton and hears from a local trust in Aberfeldy who successfully saved theirs and are still going strong after four years.

Poet Don Paterson continues his series on great movie speeches with Jack Nicholson bawling "you can't handle the truth!" in A Few Good Men.

THU 16:30 BBC Inside Science (b07pd4vy)
Adam Rutherford explores the science that is changing our world.

THU 17:00 PM (b07pd4w0)
Eddie Mair with interviews, context and analysis.

THU 18:00 Six O'Clock News (b07pd4w2)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.

THU 18:30 Tom Wrigglesworth's Hang-Ups (b07pjb9t)
Series 4, Strangers on a Train

Episode 1 - Strangers on a Train. Tom enlists the help of his Dad to take delivery of an important package while Mum bites the bullet and learns to drive.

Series 4 of Tom Wrigglesworth's Hang-Ups presents another hilarious helping of down-the-line adventures from Edinburgh Comedy Award nominated Tom. Listen in on Tom's weekly phone calls home to his Mum, Dad and Gran in Sheffield and get a glimpse into the triumphs and tribulations of the Wrigglesworth clan in all its dysfunctional glory.

Starring Tom Wrigglesworth, Paul Copley, Kate Anthony and Elizabeth Bennett.

Written by Tom Wrigglesworth and James Kettle with additional material by Miles Jupp.

Producer: Richard Morris
A BBC Studios Production.

THU 19:00 The Archers (b07pjb9w)
Richard lends his support at Lower Loxley, and scores need to be settled at Home Farm.

THU 19:15 Front Row (b07pd4w4)
Arts news, interviews and reviews.

THU 19:45 15 Minute Drama (b07pj820)
[Repeat of broadcast at 10:45 today]

THU 20:00 The Briefing Room (b07pjb9y)
David Aaronovitch hears from top experts and key players about an important issue of the day.

THU 20:30 In Business (b07pjbb0)
Supportive Partner = Success at Work

According to Sheryl Sandberg - Chief Operating Office of Facebook and one of the most powerful people in the world - the most important career choice you'll make as a woman is who you choose to be your life partner. Whilst men tend to assume they can have it all - a great career AND a great family - women don't. And she puts that down to the uneven division of labour in the home. She claims in households where both parents work full time, women do twice the amount of house work and three times the amount of childcare. She says that she and her late husband were '50/50' and that has played a huge part in her success. How many of us can claim the same?

The numbers of working mothers in the UK are at record levels with 70% of women with dependent children now part of the workforce. But those who work still earn less overall and enjoy lower status than their male counterparts, especially after having children. Evidence also shows that those who do forge the most successful careers are largely child-free.

So how easy is it to have a successful career if you are female and also a mother? Peter Day asks a range of women how they have done it, about the compromises they have they made and what have they learnt that they can pass on to future generations.

Presenter: Peter Day
Producer: Alex Lewis
Editor: Penny Murphy.

THU 21:00 BBC Inside Science (b07pd4vy)
[Repeat of broadcast at 16:30 today]

THU 21:30 The Listening Project (b07pj81y)
[Repeat of broadcast at 09:00 today]

THU 21:58 Weather (b07pd4w6)
The latest weather forecast.

THU 22:00 The World Tonight (b07pd4w8)
In-depth reporting and analysis from a global perspective.

THU 22:45 Book at Bedtime (b07pjbd4)
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, Episode 9

Nearly 30 years on from its original publication, Hilary Mantel's third novel is still as disturbing, incisive and illuminating as ever. In an unusual collaboration, the author has revisited the book to create, with the abridger, this new ten-part serialisation.

Frances Shore is a cartographer by trade, but when her husband's work takes them to Saudi Arabia she finds herself unable to map either the ever changing landscape or the Kingdom's heavily veiled ways of working. The regime is corrupt and harsh, the expatriates are hard-drinking money-grubbers, and her Muslim neighbours are secretive and watchful.

She soon discovers that the streets are not a woman's territory. Confined in her flat, she finds her sense of self beginning to dissolve. She hears footsteps, sounds of distress from the supposedly empty flat above. She has only constantly changing rumours to hang on to, and no one with whom to share her creeping unease.

In episode nine, there is a break-in and a new arrival.

Reader: Anna Maxwell Martin
Author: Hilary Mantel
Abridger: Sara Davies
Producer: Alexa Moore
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

THU 23:00 Heresy (b01snlt0)
Series 9, Episode 3

Victoria Coren Mitchell presents another edition of the show which dares to commit heresy .
Her guests this week are comedians Mark Steel and Bridget Christie and journalist Matthew Norman.

Producers: Victoria Coren Mitchell and Daisy Knight
An Avalon Television production for BBC Radio 4.

THU 23:30 Shared Experience (b06ry7gl)
Series 4, Born in the Wrong Body

When do you know you've been born the wrong gender? Fi Glover meets three people who have made the at times painful decision to become the man or woman they have always felt themselves to be.

Producer: Maggie Ayre.


FRIDAY 26 AUGUST 2016

FRI 00:00 Midnight News (b07pd4yd)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.

FRI 00:30 Book of the Week (b07q3cq2)
[Repeat of broadcast at 09:45 on Thursday]

FRI 00:48 Shipping Forecast (b07pd4yg)
The latest shipping forecast.

FRI 01:00 Selection of BBC World Service Programmes (b07pd4yj)
BBC Radio 4 joins the BBC World Service.

FRI 05:20 Shipping Forecast (b07pd4yn)
The latest shipping forecast.

FRI 05:30 News Briefing (b07pd4yr)
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.

FRI 05:43 Prayer for the Day (b07tgz4v)
A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Shaunaka Rishi Das, Director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.

FRI 05:45 Farming Today (b07pd4yt)
The latest news about food, farming and the countryside. Presented by Caz Graham and produced by Emily Hughes.

FRI 05:58 Tweet of the Day (b038qkbj)
Melodious Warbler

Tweet of the Day is a series of fascinating stories about our British birds inspired by their calls and songs.

Brett Westwood presents the melodious warbler. A lemon-yellow warbler singing on a sunny Spanish hillside will be the well-named Melodious Warbler. They are slightly smaller than blackcaps, moss-green above and pale yellow below. You may occasionally see them in the UK in late summer or autumn. The song is melodious and the bird often includes nasal chattering phrases that sound like house sparrows.

FRI 06:00 Today (b07p13h8)
Morning news and current affairs. Including Sports Desk, Weather and Thought for the Day.

FRI 09:00 The Reunion (b07pdd7r)
[Repeat of broadcast at 11:15 on Sunday]

FRI 09:45 Book of the Week (b07q3ct6)
Wish Lanterns, Episode 5

The stories of young Chinese lives, particularly those young people born under the one-child policy of the 1980s, as they seek to negotiate the expectations of those around them and their own inner desires for self-fulfilment.

There are approximately 322 million Chinese aged between 16 and 30 - a group larger than the population of the USA and destined to have an unprecedented influence on global affairs in the coming years. The one-child policy has led to a generation of only children. There is intense competition for education and jobs, and a tug-of-war between cultural change and tradition, nationalism and the lures of the West.

Dahai is a military child and a would be rebel, Fred is a daughter of the Party, Snail the son of a farming family and Xiaoxiao grew up in the far north and longed to travel south. All were infants when the tanks rolled through Beijing in 1989 and none really know much about their country's recent past. But the way China develops in the future is very much something that will affect their lives - and their behaviour and decisions will affect ours.

In today's episode we rejoin the cohort in 2014 as they approach or turn 30 years old. Stable employment continues to preoccupy them , as does the question of when and how to start a family.

Written by Alec Ash
Read by David Seddon
Abridged and Produced by Jill Waters
A Waters Company production for BBC Radio 4.

FRI 10:00 Woman's Hour (b07pd4yw)
Programme that offers a female perspective on the world.

FRI 10:45 15 Minute Drama (b07pjkhm)
Blood and Milk, Episode 5

by Gregory Evans

To save both her brother and the family's dairy business Meg must risk everything and confront the dangerous Moses Lipski. Thriller set in 1890s Whitechapel.

Directed by Marc Beeby.

FRI 11:00 Jarvis and Matthew (b07pjkhp)
Hanging In

Christopher Matthew & Martin Jarvis continue on their nostalgic journey into their past.

It was in the Seventies that Martin Jarvis and Christopher Matthews both made the moves that were to give their careers the second wind that would carry them through to the Eighties (and beyond).

For Martin it was his insistence (against the advice of his agent) that he follow up his portrayal as Nicholas Nickleby by auditioning for the role of Uriah Heap - suddenly he shook off the shackles of being the eternal youth and instead he took on a succession of more adult parts (from Oliver Pryde in 'Rings On Their Fingers' to the Governor in 'Doctor Who'). And it allowed him to become one of the best known voices in the country - through his extensive voice-over work on countless TV commercials and on the radio (ironically through his readings of 'Billy Bunter' and Richmal Crompton's 'Just William').

Meanwhile, Christopher left behind the advertising agencies of Berkeley Square and moved across to Fleet Street and Broadcasting House. A chance encounter with a travel editor for the Sunday Times persuaded him to become a freelance writer and the following week he was commissioned for his first piece. A life of travel writing and humorous columns followed - even the occasional book - mostly humorous.

In fact it was as a result of hearing him reading from the diaries of his accident-prone her Simon Crisp in Diary of a Somebody on Radio 4 in 1978 that Martin finally reached out to Christopher and thus began a friendship and frequent collaboration that has lasted for the nigh on 40 years.

Producer: Paul Kobrak.

FRI 11:30 Start/Stop (b07pjkhr)
Series 3, BnB

Start/Stop is a sitcom by Jack Docherty about three marriages in various states of disrepair.

Barney and Cathy have been married for ages and it shows, Evan and Fiona's marriage is one big, noisy argument and David is old enough to be Alice's father.

Start/Stop follows the story of these three couples as they try to make the best of their marriages and friendships, and the characters are able to stop the action, explain themselves to the audience and start it all up again.

This week: 'BnB'.

Barney and Cathy's finances are in a bad state. So Barney decides to become an Uber driver to boost his income (and to 'bump into' Alice more often). And Cathy decides to rent their spare bedroom out on Air BnB. Meanwhile Evan and Fiona are arguing. And David writes a raunchy bestseller based, to her horror, around Alice.

Written by: Jack Docherty
Producer: Claire Jones

A BBC Studio Production.

FRI 12:00 News Summary (b07pd4yy)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.

FRI 12:04 Home Front (b07kcj4t)
26 August 1916

On this day in 1916, the British took 200 yards of German trenches near Bazentin-le-Petit, capturing a machine gun, and Johnnie Marshall has a plan.

Written by Katie Hims
Directed by Jessica Dromgoole.

FRI 12:15 You and Yours (b07pd4z2)
Consumer news and issues.

FRI 12:57 Weather (b07pd4z4)
The latest weather forecast.

FRI 13:00 World at One (b07pd4z6)
Analysis of news and current affairs.

FRI 13:45 Unforgettable (b07pjkht)
Rodnell Collins/Malcolm X

Rodnell Collins has an imagined conversation with his late uncle, Malcolm X. Using archive clips, they are reunited in the Boston home they used to share.

As a young boy, Rodnell would sit in the living room of the house listening to the adults talk into the small hours, under strict instructions from his mother Ella to be seen and not heard.

Now he takes the opportunity to bring his own opinions to the table and to interact with Malcolm X's words as spoken before his assassination in February 1965. The dialogue is infused with irony as Rodnell compares his own experience of being a black Muslim in America today with that of his uncle's fight for civil and human rights in the early 1960s.

In 1991 Natalie Cole sang a duet with her long dead father, Nat King Cole - the result was Unforgettable. This is the radio equivalent. In each edition of the series, a different guest is invited to interact with someone, now dead, with whom they have, or have wanted to have, a connection. Using technology designed for musicians and DJs to spontaneously play out short musical clips, producer Adam Fowler facilitates a real-time conversation between the two participants, using conversational snippets of the deceased from past recordings.

The guest has no advance knowledge of the excerpts, and the conversation can take unexpected turns, occasionally leading to some emotionally charged interchanges, as living voices engage with those preserved in the archive.

Research: Philippa Geering
Producer: Adam Fowler
An Overtone production for BBC Radio 4.

FRI 14:00 The Archers (b07pjb9w)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:00 on Thursday]

FRI 14:15 Drama (b07pjkhw)
Northern Lights

It's check-in day at a caravan park in Northern England and handyman Tom is starting to realise that blocked plumbing and broken aerials are, by far, the least of his problems.

Paul Fraser is a screenwriter and director often collaborating with his long term writing partner, Shane Meadows, on films such as TwentyFourSeven, A Room for Romeo Brass, Once Upon a Time In the Midlands, Dead Man's Shoes and Somers Town.
Paul also wrote Heartlands directed by Damien O'Donnell and starring Michael Sheen.

Writer ..... Paul Fraser
Producer/Director ..... Gemma McMullan.

FRI 15:00 Gardeners' Question Time (b07pjkhy)
Nottinghamshire

Eric Robson and the panel are in Nottinghamshire. Bob Flowerdew, Anne Swithinbank and Pippa Greenwood provide the answers to this week's horticultural queries.

Produced by Dan Cocker
Assistant Producer: Laurence Bassett

A Somethin' Else production for BBC Radio 4.

FRI 15:45 Writing Lives (b047wfpk)
Slum Songs in the Sun

Writing Lives is a series of short stories by writers new to Radio 4 and based on personal experience.

In Slum Songs in the Sun by Jane Campion Hoye, when a woman volunteers at a school in a slum in Kenya she meets a girl who makes her confront an impossible dream.

Jane Campion Hoye is a Midlands-based writer and performer. This is her first commission for BBC Radio 4.

Read by Sally Orrock

Producer: Paul Dodgson
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

FRI 16:00 Last Word (b07pjkj2)
Obituary series, analysing and celebrating the life stories of people who have recently died.

FRI 16:30 More or Less (b07pjkj5)
Series that investigates the numbers in the news.

FRI 16:55 The Listening Project (b06mg2ty)
Kim and Luke - Really Good at Laughing

Fi Glover introduces a conversation between a mother and her nine year old son, sharing the joys and frustrations of life with his disabled twin; Another in the series that proves it's surprising what you hear when you listen.

The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they've never discussed intimately before. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation - they're not BBC interviews, and that's an important difference - lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Most of the unedited conversations are being archived by the British Library and used to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium. You can learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject

Producer: Marya Burgess.

FRI 17:00 PM (b07pd4zb)
Coverage and analysis of the day's news.

FRI 18:00 Six O'Clock News (b07pd4zd)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.

FRI 18:30 The Museum of Curiosity (b07pjn84)
Series 9, Colgan, Ramirez, Frankopan

This week, the Professor of Ignorance John Lloyd and his curator Noel Fielding welcome:

Dr Janina Ramirez, art historian and TV presenter. Janina is Course Director for the Undergraduate Certificate in History of Art at the University of Oxford. He presenter credits include Treasures of the Anglo-Saxons; The Viking Sagas; Britain's Most Fragile Treasure; The Private Lives of Medieval Kings. Her latest book is The Private Lives of the Saints: Power, Passion and Politics in Anglo-Saxon England.

Peter Frankopan, Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian, and contributed to many TV and Radio documentaries. His latest book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World was named The Daily Telegraph's History Book of the Year 2015.

Jenny Colgan, a novelist who writes romantic comedies, sci-fi and children's books. Her first novel Amanda's Wedding was published in 1999, and she has written 26 more since then. In 2013 she won the Romantic Novel of the Year award for Welcome to Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop of Dreams. Her audio play The Time Reaver - starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate will be released in August 2016.

This week, the Museum's Guest Committee appreciate a medieval polymath nun who created her own language; a collection of food additives from the 1970s; and an infinite number of colours that exist only in the mind and all with the same name.

The show was researched by Mike Turner and Anne Miller of QI.

The producers were Richard Turner and James Harkin.

It was a BBC Studios Production.

FRI 19:00 The Archers (b07pjn8v)
Helen hopes she can help, and there is a new offer on the table for Pip.

FRI 19:15 Front Row (b07pd4zg)
News, reviews and interviews from the worlds of art, literature, film and music.

FRI 19:45 15 Minute Drama (b07pjkhm)
[Repeat of broadcast at 10:45 today]

FRI 20:00 Any Questions? (b07pjn8x)
Sophie Walker

Ed Stourton presents political debate and discussion from Salford with a panel including the leader of the Women's Quality Party, Sophie Walker.

FRI 20:50 A Point of View (b07pjn8z)
A reflection on a topical issue.

FRI 21:00 Home Front - Omnibus (b07kcj4w)
22-26 August 1916

In the week in 1916 when the East and South East coasts were terrorised by air raids, Folkestone seems brim-full of secrets and lies.

Written by Katie Hims
Directed by Jessica Dromgoole

Sound: Martha Littlehailes
Composer: Matthew Strachan
Consultant Historian: Maggie Andrews.

FRI 21:58 Weather (b07pd4zl)
The latest weather forecast.

FRI 22:00 The World Tonight (b07pd4zn)
In-depth reporting and analysis from a global perspective.

FRI 22:45 Book at Bedtime (b07pjn92)
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, Episode 10

Nearly 30 years on from its original publication, Hilary Mantel's third novel is still as disturbing, incisive and illuminating as ever. In an unusual collaboration, the author has revisited the book to create, with the abridger, this new ten-part serialisation.

Frances Shore is a cartographer by trade, but when her husband's work takes them to Saudi Arabia she finds herself unable to map either the ever changing landscape or the Kingdom's heavily veiled ways of working. The regime is corrupt and harsh, the expatriates are hard-drinking money-grubbers, and her Muslim neighbours are secretive and watchful.

She soon discovers that the streets are not a woman's territory. Confined in her flat, she finds her sense of self beginning to dissolve. She hears footsteps, sounds of distress from the supposedly empty flat above. She has only constantly changing rumours to hang on to, and no one with whom to share her creeping unease.

In the final episode, Frances tries to discover the truth.

Reader: Anna Maxwell Martin
Author: Hilary Mantel
Abridger: Sara Davies
Producer: Alexa Moore
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

FRI 23:00 Woman's Hour (b07pjn94)
Late Night Woman's Hour

The broadcast edition of this programme will be available on iPlayer soon after transmission. A longer version will be available as a podcast.

FRI 23:30 Great Lives (b07pgvjz)
[Repeat of broadcast at 16:30 on Tuesday]

FRI 23:55 The Listening Project (b06mv2zp)
Laurie and Roland - A Legacy in Lego

Fi Glover introduces a conversation recorded during a building session, between a father whose own childhood obsession with the Danish toy has been passed on to his small son; another conversation in the series that proves it's surprising what you hear when you listen.

The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they've never discussed intimately before. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation - they're not BBC interviews, and that's an important difference - lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Most of the unedited conversations are being archived by the British Library and used to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium. You can learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject

Producer: Marya Burgess.