Kate Chisholm

You couldn’t move across the BBC’s airwaves this week without stumbling on an anniversary programme celebrating 40 years since the launch of Radios One, Two, Three and Four. The Corporation even laid on a self-congratulatory ‘Radio Week’ on BBC4, which seems a bit OTT to me. (Did anyone really choose to watch the ‘earliest episode of The Archers ever recorded’ at 11 p.m. on Thursday?) What surprises me is not so much that radio has survived the onslaught of TV — there’s an aural quality to the experience of listening to a play, a documentary, even a news bulletin that TV can never satisfy — but that it’s survived despite changing so little about itself.

Next time you’re bemoaning the TV licence fee, check out the BBC’s World Service. Next time you’re bemoaning the TV licence fee, check out the BBC’s World Service. A different quality appears to prevail in their making of radio documentaries — more time spent on research, less on presentation. No tricks, no smoochy music. Just experts sharing with us their enthusiasm and knowledge. Trouble is, you need an advanced degree in electronics and time management to find the station and what’s on when. A lot of fuss was made a fortnight ago when Vladimir Putin put a stop to the FM transmission of the BBC World Service in Moscow, although it is still possible to tune in to the Russian Service on medium- or short-wave or to listen via the web.

Yet another rash of programmes has erupted marking the anniversary of yet another of Britain’s disastrous foreign policy decisions. At midnight on 14 August it will be 60 years since Nehru, as the prime minister of newly independent India, pronounced those fateful words, ‘A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.’ Yet another rash of programmes has erupted marking the anniversary of yet another of Britain’s disastrous foreign policy decisions.

Back in the US in the Fifties, just as atomic fear was gripping the American nation and the McCarthyite witch hunts were at their most vicious, a rather extraordinary radio programme was created by the journalist Edward R. Murrow and his production team at CBS radio. This I Believe presented ‘The living philosophies of thoughtful men and women in the hope that they may strengthen your beliefs so that your life may be richer, fuller, happier.’ With a title taken from Murrow’s Quaker upbringing, the idea that sustained the programme was that by examining and revealing the things which make us tick, the beliefs by which we operate our daily lives, we might help others to find their way through this chaotic world.

I’m not quite sure which of the political weeklies has been the inspiration for His Master’s Voice, the new comedy series on Radio Four (Wednesdays) set in the offices of a true blue magazine, but I can assure you that life at The Blue Touch bears little resemblance to The Spectator. No one at Blue Touch ever seems to do any real work putting the magazine together — there’s no cursing about useless computer systems, no panicky ‘Hold the Front Page’ moments, no heated rows about headlines and cover images, and whether or not it’s OK to be quite so tacky about certain celebrities.

Strange to think of Tom Stoppard attaining three score years and ten. It seems a mere nanosecond since we were first dazzled by his disturbing take on Shakespeare, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and his plays are still characterised by the tumbling ideas and linguistic foreplay of youthful ingenuity. To celebrate his birthday, BBC Radio has come up with an unusual season of plays that spans the stations from Radio Three to BBC7. This week you could have heard Arcadia and his 15-Minute Hamlet on Radio Four, while on Radio Three the Nightwaves team discussed the extraordinary success of R&G, which was premiered by Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre company at the Old Vic in 1967.

The last thing Winston Churchill (or Ramsay MacDonald, for that matter) would have thought of discussing before taking power as prime minister was the kind of books they read to their children, or took to bed with them after a hard night’s slog wading through government papers. But such are the times we now live in that Gordon Brown felt compelled this week to disclose to Mariella Frostrup that his favourite children’s book was an illustrated fable by Julia Donaldson. (For the uninitiated she writes books like The Snail and the Whale and The Gruffalo, whose square-jawed visage has already become so familiar to families with young children.) Frostrup interviewed our new PM for Open Book (Radio Four, Sunday), asking him to choose five of his favourite books.

A small but beautifully staged exhibition is now on show in the garret of Dr Johnson’s House in London. It was in this room that Johnson worked on his mammoth Dictionary of the English Language. A large roof-space with eaves and heavily charred roof timbers (the roof was set on fire by the Germans a couple of times during the second world war), it’s been taken over temporarily by the personality of his friend (and former pupil) David Garrick. For almost 30 years, from 1747 to 1776, Garrick as actor-manager was in charge of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, thrilling audiences with his performances as Richard III, or reducing them to helpless laughter as Don Felix in The Wonder (by Susannah Centlivre).

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.

You may have caught an extraordinary programme of interviews with Peckham’s Lost on Radio Four a couple of weeks ago. Winifred Robinson (of You and Yours) went to meet some of the teenagers of that notorious south-east London parish, and also their parents. At one point she found herself talking to the father of the boy now in jail because he was the leader of the gang who brutally killed Mary-Ann Lenehan. (She bled to death from 40 stab wounds after being sexually assaulted; her friend survived, but only just.) There was a chilling moment as Robinson probed and needled, trying to get out of him something more than the usual bland equivocation.