End of the world

It’s your last chance this afternoon to catch one of the best programmes on Radio Four, guaranteed to come up each week with something a bit different: an unusual voice or opinion or insight. For the last couple of years it’s been infuriatingly easy to miss, broadcast at 5.30 on a Saturday afternoon when you’re either too exhausted by a week’s worth of chores to listen to anything other than Mantovani (or Monteverdi, depending on your taste) or too busy revving up for a night out to pay attention to something so densely packed with information. But in its nine-year run A World in Your Ear has always given its listeners an unusual opportunity to find out what’s going on in the world beyond Portland Place and the White City not via BBC reporters (as in Crossing Continents and From Our Own Correspondent or on the World Service) but by tuning into radio stations around the globe.