Radio column: Lifting the spirits

At the tail end of Christmas Day many of you, like me, will have found yourself reflecting on life’s big questions.

Can my backside, which has been welded to an armchair since lunchtime, withstand two whole hours of Downtown Abbey?  Is it possible to retrieve the Malteser that rolled under the sofa in the middle of the Queen’s speech?  Can a person die from eating too many Mini Cheddars?

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Radio column: Seasonal sounds

Don't you love this time of year? The heady waft of mince pies, the sweet smiles of small children, the gentle sound of... Noddy Holder screaming "IT'S CHRIIIIIISTMAAAAAAAAAS" at the top of his lungs. When Noddy starts yelling on "Merry Xmas Everybody", even dogs smother their ears.
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Radio column: Strictly out of step

"It’s Saturday morning and it’s just gone 10 o’clock,” bellowed Vernon Kay, “and we are here! We are here! We are live!” Where, Vernon? I bellowed back from my kitchen.

Where are you? Admiring the sunrise from the top of mount Kilimanjaro? Hanging with the Rolling Stones at their mammoth 48-hour post-gig party? Hammering out a Middle East peace plan with Ban Ki-moon?

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Radio column: Learning to let go

"This is my life, I can't just throw it away," said an elderly woman in Radio 3's Between the Ears, the panic rising in her voice. She was in process of moving into sheltered housing, and the prospect of reducing her worldly goods was making her ill. She had, she explained, just spent three days in hospital.

It's just stuff, of course, this clutter that spills from our shelves and our cupboards and piles up on furniture and the floor. The day will come to us all when everything we have amassed in the course of our existence will be loaded into a skip, crushed to the size of a shoebox and become worm food in a landfill. I sincerely hope, when that day comes, to be worm food myself.

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Radio column: Where's the party?

In another universe, this would have been the mother of all office parties. Senior editors would have been caught on smart-phones dancing Gangnam style on their desks, a bottle of bubbly in one hand and a hunk of birthday cake in the other. Arses would have been hoisted on to photocopiers, with the choicest images used to add a layer of soundproofing to the Loose Ends studio. 
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Radio column: Is classical music for everyone?

Is classical music really for everyone? This was the question posed by the writer and presenter Tom Service, chair of a live debate at the Sage in Gateshead as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking festival, to which the answer is: if only. 
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Book review: I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, By Sylvie Simmons

Where do you start with Leonard Cohen: poet, novelist, singer, songwriter, father, son, womaniser, traveller, bon viveur, drug-user, depressive, spiritual recluse? The sheer size of Sylvie Simmons's biography is testament to Cohen's many incarnations, assorted narratives and vast back catalogue.
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Radio column: Flush of joy

Is it acceptable to talk on the phone when you're sitting on the toilet? The American humourist David Sedaris says not, though his sister Tiffany would beg to differ. "Don't mind me," she has been known to say, with the strained tone of someone engaging in heavy lifting, while clasping the phone to her ear. "I'm just… trying to get… the lid… off this… jar." 
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Radio column: Waiting for the man

Focusing on a single band over a weekend is a tricky business on the radio. Get it wrong and you risk provoking the ire of the music police, who are a bit like the fashion police only more militant. They will rain hellfire and damnation down on you on Twitter, picket outside your office and very likely follow you home, barge into your house, skim through your record collection and locate the copy of Kylie and Jason's "Especially for You" that you had studiously hidden from your family, and hold it up as evidence of your abominable taste.
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Radio column: Wrong direction for the travelling man

Over the past week the ghosts of dead DJs have been stalking the corridors of the BBC. Among the nastier apparitions has been Jimmy Savile, a man alleged to have abused scores of children though who, because of his connections and charitable work, was deemed beyond reproach. More cheeringly, we have also seen the reappearance, from beyond the grave, of Kenny Everett, a groundbreaking DJ and comic who was denounced from some quarters as a pervert on the basis of his homosexuality.
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Radio column: Tory stories starting to show their age

Consider, for a moment, the title of Radio 4's Five More Ages of Brandreth. Should anyone be wondering what was going through the minds of commissioning editors when they gave the series the green light, the clue is surely in the word "more".

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Radio column: Key moments

It's Piano Season on Radio 3. That's right, Piano Season. Now, I'm no expert when it comes to classical music, but surely, just as every day is guitar day on BBC6 Music and auto-tuned-twazzock-whining-over-fizzing-euro-pop day on Radio 1, on Radio 3 it's "piano season" all year around. Which raises the question: how is this current celebration doing anything out of the ordinary?
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Book review: How Music Works, by David Byrne

In his new book, the former Talking Heads singer David Byrne, dubbed rock's Renaissance man by Time magazine, looks at the roles played by time, place, technology, architecture, money and human relationships in shaping music. If this sounds like a stripping-away of music's romantic heart, fear not.
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Radio column: Story of a good sport

"Everyone believed it would be sorted out within a couple of days," Salman Rushdie told Andrew Marr, talking about the extraordinary moment on Valentine's Day, 1989, when he received word that Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini had ordered his execution following the publication of The Satanic Verses. 
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Book review: Winter Journal, by Paul Auster

Paul Auster sets out his stall at the start of Winter Journal. Writing in the second person, he outlines his plan "to put aside your stories for now and try to examine what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one." If only he'd stuck to the brief. 

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Radio column: Talking the talk

So what's the deal with radio playlists, asked Pat, Mike and Marie on Radio 4's Feedback. Who gets to decide the music that gets played? Do listeners have any input? Why do we have to hear the same record repeatedly throughout the course of a day? Do DJs actually DJ anymore?
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Britpop bad boy's back on a high

“I've never liked standing around waiting for stuff to happen, I like to do new things,” remarks Tim Burgess. He's not wrong. 
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Radio column: Sorting the men from the boys

"In his secret fantasies," said the historian Amanda Vickery in her Radio 4 series Amanda Vickery on… Men, "I wonder if every British man isn't something of a hero, questing, intrepid, undaunted." Really? Most of my male friends' idea of courage doesn't extend much further than venturing out to the chip shop at pub chucking-out time. But what do I know? Perhaps my ownership of ovaries renders me blind to man's primal instincts.
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TV review: Dallas, Channel 5

Praise be, they've kept the title sequence. Dallas, the mama of all American soap operas, is famous for a lot of things - Stetsons, satin sheets, surreal shower scenes, the slow disintegration of Priscilla Presley's nose - but perhaps the most memorable component in its Eighties incarnation was the opening credits in which mirrored skyscrapers were juxtaposed with the bucolic idyll of Southfork, and split-screens showed JR, Bobby, Sue-Ellen et al pulling panto poses to a histrionic orchestral soundtrack. Such things are sacred. 
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A potty-mouthed prankster? That's why we love Russell Brand

Russell Brand has returned to stand-up. Fiona Sturges witnessed the comeback
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Radio column: Video games

The last time I played a video game was in 1985. It was a pocket-sized, black-and-white "LCD cardgame" called Trojan Horse, the aim of which was to prevent Trojans from getting into a castle by either pinging arrows at them or drowning them in the moat. Every now and then a horse would appear bursting with hundreds of the blighters. It was quite an adrenaline rush, I can tell you, though gradually I began to tire of the senseless slaughter.
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TV review: Toast of London, Channel 4/Our War, BBC3

Comedy pilot. Now there are two words that strike fear into the soul. While they're undoubtedly useful for rooting out new talent, for me they always bring to mind focus groups in which hollow-cheeked students sit in subterranean screening rooms tittering unconvincingly at "the next Noel Fielding" in exchange for a beer and a fortnight's supply of Pot Noodle.
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Radio column: Golden games

It was the morning after the night before and at the crack of dawn on Monday, Radio 4's Today presenters were searching for adjectives to describe the Olympic closing ceremony, the kind that would mask the widespread sense that, had it taken place in the back room of a pub in Nantwich, we would have raised our glasses to a hen party well done.
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Book review: Adventures of a Waterboy, by Mike Scott

Mike Scott received a lesson on the perils of fame long before he found it for himself as the front man of the Celtic rockers the Waterboys. As a young punk fan in London in 1978, he came face to face with his idol Patti Smith after a concert and watched her cutting hangers-on down to size like a "haughty queen toying with her subjects".
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Trail of the Unexpected: Stargazing in France

The galaxy in all its glory can be enjoyed from the comfort of your bed in a luxurious prefab in central France, says Fiona Sturges
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TV review: The Churchills, Channel 4

Committed Winstonian David Starkey embarks on the history of an English aristocratic line
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Radio column: Nothing compares to Sinéad

Interviewing pop musicians can be a thankless task. I know this as I've interviewed a few of them myself. Their talents usually lie not in talking but in compacting their thoughts into three-minute pop songs, and getting them to explain what they do can be like trying to trap water in a sieve.
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Antony Hegarty: 'It takes nerve to get through your sense of shame on stage'

When it comes to magazine interviews, there are, as a rule, expectations on both sides as to how the conversation should go. While the interviewee is invariably there to promote their latest product, the interviewer is looking to find out something about the person behind the work. These differing objectives can sometimes lead to tension, with each party reluctant to yield to the other. But with experience and mutual understanding, a middle ground is usually found. I say "usually".
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TV review: The Men Who Made Us Fat, BBC Two

If your evening regime involves lying on the sofa with a KFC boneless banquet wedged between your knees and a bucket of Fanta, complete with multi-angled drinking straw to prevent unnecessary movement, under your armpit, then you would have been forgiven for avoiding The Men Who Made Us Fat. Who, after all, wants to spend their downtime being made to feel like a self-harming, NHS-crushing lard-arse?
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Radio column: Ferguson's fighting talk

"Be warned: the view that I am about to state is highly unfashionable," announced Professor Niall Ferguson in his final Reith Lecture on Radio 4. But which one?
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Woody Guthrie: These songs are your songs

He wrote a soundtrack for the 20th century but, 100 years since his birth, Fiona Sturges asks if it still rings true
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TV review: Episodes, Series Finale, BBC Two

There are a few things wrong with Episodes, the comedy series in which Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig play a British scriptwriting couple who take their hit sitcom across the pond, but there’s a lot more that’s right with it. Look beyond the horrible title sequence, in which a television script literally takes flight and flaps all the way from London to Los Angeles, and the ghastly parping music which transports you not to a sunny Californian TV studio but a low-rent BBC panel game complete with plywood set, and you’ll find a show worth cherishing.
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Radio column: Class act that's right on the money

OK, so I might have exaggerated. A few months ago, I wrote about my intolerance of radio drama, two words that, when used separately are quite harmless in my mind but when put together provoke an overwhelming compulsion to dig a hole in the garden, drop the radio in it and fill it in with concrete, just to make sure.
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Theatre review: Dandy Dick, Theatre Royal, Brighton

Sir Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1887 comedy has been given a wide berth by directors - it was last staged in the West End in 1973 - and its author largely forgotten. Pinero was celebrated at his peak for his rehabilitation of the farce, and for a while outshone Wilde and Shaw, though his star waned and he died in relative obscurity.
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Book review: Diamond in the Rough, by Shawn Colvin

As a child growing up in rural South Dakota, Shawn Colvin liked to start fires. Out in the prairie she would build little mounds of straw and set them alight, though one day the wind blew too strongly and she was forced to raise the alarm. Nevertheless, this perilous hobby continued into adulthood as she burned the memorabilia of broken relationships. "Just like when I was a kid, there was trouble," she recalls. "All my fires backfired."
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Radio column: Estates of the nation deliver some home truths

If, on Monday morning, the news that David Cameron was to announce proposals to abolish housing benefit to the under-25s and restrict welfare payments to large families left much of the nation poleaxed, for radio editors desperate to move the national conversation on from the deficiencies of the English football team and a dead tortoise, it was nothing short of a gift.
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Jesca Hoop: "It feels good to tell people how it was."

Several years ago Jesca Hoop was sitting in the bath in Los Angeles when the phone rang. At the other end was Elbow's Guy Garvey. He had heard her debut album, Kismet, and wanted to know more about its author. It turned out to be a pivotal moment. As well as interviewing her on his radio show on BBC6 Music, thereby introducing her to a British audience, Garvey invited Hoop to support Elbow on tour. Through that she met her current partner, the band's manager, Tom Piper, prompting her move from sunny LA to the earthier environs of Chorlton in Manchester.
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Radio column: Ulysses blooms once more

Like many others before me, I attempted Ulysses in my late teens. I managed to read the whole of the spine before uttering an exhausted "Sod this" and turning my attention to what I felt was a more deserving literary cause: Jilly Cooper's Riders.
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Radio column: How Richard Branson grew up and found his wings

When Richard Branson was five years old his mother stopped the car, ordered him to get out and told him to make his own way to his grandparents' house. This, it turns out, wasn't an act of cruelty but an effective lesson in learning how to stand on your own two feet.
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Radio column: a cringing royal appointment

How do you do the Jubilee on the radio? Is it actually possible to discuss the impending royal knees-up without archive films of trestle tables bisecting drab Seventies streets, and of the young monarch gamely watching "exotic" performances under a canopy in an unnamed African country, the Duke silently rolling his eyes in the background.
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Radio column: How the Brits lost their Blitz spirit

Whatever happened to stoicism? At what point did we Brits give up on the chilliness enforced by centuries of corporal punishment and parental indifference and yield to the impulse to get everything out in the open?
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TV review: Harlots, Housewives and Heroines, BBC Four

Ooh look, she’s at it again. Fresh from hurling insults at David Starkey (well, he started it) and provoking the ire of historian Alison Light - who presumably didn’t make it through BBC casting - for daring to try on a bonnet on the box and thus “cheapening history”, Dr Lucy Worsley is back on our screens, doing ninja kicks in Puritan dress, trying Restoration gowns for size and shamelessly discussing Samuel Pepys’s “emissions”.
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Music review: Live Transmission: Scanner and Heritage Orchestra rework Joy Division, Dome, Brighton

Finally! Thirty-two years to the day that the Joy Division singer Ian Curtis hanged himself in his kitchen comes an event celebrating his musical legacy rather than wallowing in the myth and melodrama of his demise.
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Theatre review: The Jolly Folly of Polly the Scottish Trolley Dolly and Other Mini-Marvels, Brighton Fringe

In a tiny upstairs theatre, a man in a wig and kimono asks us to imagine we’re in the Albert Hall. We never discover his name though, in his role in a glittering production of Madame Butterfly, he is known as “Second Japanese villager on the left”.
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Graham Coxon: All a blur

On an unusually bright morning at Graham Coxon's house in Camden, north London, his girlfriend Essy lets me in and directs me upstairs to the attic room where Coxon is having his picture taken. I am followed by Frankie, the couple's hyperactive terrier, who spends much of the next hour trying to insert her nose in my sheepskin boots, despite the very visible obstruction that are my legs.
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TV review: Tales of Television Centre, BBC Four

“It’s like Big Ben. It’s like the Houses of Parliament. It’s like St Paul’s,” observed Susan Hampshire, reflecting on the iconic properties of Television Centre, the BBC’s 52-year-old nerve centre. Steady on, Susan, you thought, let’s not overdo it. But that was before we’d seen some of its most long-serving and frankly terrifying employees, Paxman, Attenborough and Bakewell among them, getting all misty-eyed over this unprepossessing lump of concrete and glass, and mourning its imminent demise.
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Radio column: Leaving it to the listeners

"I'm relying on your wit because I've left mine in a caravan in Altrincham," announced Liza Tarbuck at the start of her new show on Radio 2. Alas, she wasn't joking.
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Theatre review: A World I Loved, Brighton Festival

Among the many heartening aspects of last year’s Arab uprisings was the visible role of women in the protests. These women might easily have looked to the writings of Wadad Makdisi Cortas for inspiration.
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Music review: The Great Escape, Various Venues, Brighton

The Great Escape, Brighton’s answer to Texas’s South-by-Southwest festival, has grown at an alarming rate in its six-year existence. Now hosting 300 bands across 30 venues, the most visible result of this expansion is a problem with queues.
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Radio column: Portrait of a gospel great

Mahalia Jackson was a woman on fire," said Cerys Matthews in Conjuring Halie in that tremulous half-whisper of hers. "Her hair danced madly when she sang out in her rich contralto voice, and (she) moved her listeners to shout and cry."
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Book review: Banksy - The Man Behind the Wall, By Will Ellsworth-Jones

Portrait of the artist as an urban vandal and control freak
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TV review: Shakespeare in Italy, BBC2

Francesco da Mosto’s two-parter is ostensibly about the Bard and his fascination with the TV historian’s native Italy. In reality, it’s a film about da Mosto and his apparently God-given, below-the-belt hotness.
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Radio column: What women want

There are people out there, or so I'm told, who believe that Radio 4's Woman's Hour shouldn't exist. These are the same people, one presumes, who talk about feminism in the past tense, referring to that silly business when women got uppity about not being able to do things like vote or have a career, and being treated as simpletons.
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Book review: Telling Stories, by Tim Burgess

There are several eye-watering anecdotes in this memoir by Tim Burgess of The Charlatans, though one in particular stands out. It involves a straw, a paper cone, a Rizla paper and two willing participants, and offers the seasoned cocaine user a novel method of ingesting their drug of choice. Suffice to say that this chapter is called "Cocainus".
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Visit the seaside for electric cucumbers, nudity and more!

This year's Brighton Fringe is bigger and brasher than ever, says Fiona Sturges
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Radio column: One too many whines

Has there ever been a more glorious title for a programme as Radio 5 Live's Drunk Again: Ann Widdecombe Investigates? Prior to listening, I had visions of Britain's newest national treasure three sheets to the wind, wobbling out of a Wetherspoon in mini-dress and heels at one in the morning, and trying to snog a policeman.
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Music review: Ladyhawke, Komedia, Brighton

If you had taken seriously the relentless hyperbole swirling around Ladyhawke aka Pip Brown four years ago, which included feverish endorsements from Courtney Love and Kylie Minogue, then you’d expect to see her packing out Gaga-sized arenas by now, not playing the first date of her tour to a small audience in the upstairs room of a modest comedy club.
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TV review: Louis Theroux: Extreme Love, BBC Two

In Louis Theroux: Extreme Love, a film about the realities of looking after children with autism, a mother of twin girls from New Jersey confessed: “I just try and make them happy because, God forgive me, I don’t get a lot of enjoyment from them.” Meanwhile Josephine, the relentlessly cheery mother of 20-year-old Brian, remarked: “To be afraid of your child is a terrible thing.”
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Radio review: Trip back in time

If your legs start twitching when you hear "Jack Your Body" and the scent of Vicks VapoRub sends you into a nostalgic reverie; if you still dream of havin' it large at the Ministry of Sound at the weekend but can't stomach the cost of a babysitter; if you're an ex-raver of a certain age then you could do worse than switch on to Radio 2 on a Saturday night and listen to the network's latest appointment, the long-serving dance DJ Dave Pearce.
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Rufus Wainwright: 'I am somewhat imprisoned by my fabulous career'

Hailing from folk royalty, Rufus Wainwright has happily toured the world almost all his life. But how is he managing to combine stardom with the commitments of fatherhood?
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Radio column: Great minds

You could never accuse radio of dodging the Big Questions. I'm not talking about programmes that weigh up the merits of pensions over ISAs, cabbage over kale or Boris over Ken, as life altering as these topics may be.
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Book review: A Natural Woman, By Carole King

Musicians' autobiographies are typically crammed with the classic signifiers of stardom: sexual encounters, drugs and alcohol-fuelled hi-jinks, followed by remorse and redemption. Not Carole King's. The singer-songwriter whose album Tapestry spent six years in the US charts and sold 25 million copies, is a hard worker who drinks in moderation, doesn't touch drugs and likes to be in bed early and get her full eight hours.
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Radio column: Intimate snippets of a family life

"Never forget what belly you came out of," cautioned a grandfather to his granddaughter in The Listening Project. The conversation lasted just a few minutes but revealed much about the social and economic shift that had taken place over three generations of one Yorkshire family.
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Time to put a lid on all those not so great British shows

Television is turning into one long Little Britain sketch, says Fiona Sturges
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Book review: How Soon Is Now? By Richard King

To the younger generation of music fans, "indie" is a genre, a ubiquitous term used to describe artfully scruffy purveyors of white-boy guitar pop. In the late Seventies and Eighties, however, it was an abbreviation of "independent", used to distinguish the small, self-financed, artist-friendly record labels - the type started in garages, garden sheds and behind the counters of record shops - from their corporate counterparts.
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Radio column: Hooked on the classics

So, Schubert. He's inescapable, or at least he is on Radio 3. If you're not an admirer but a regular listener, you'll either have to decamp to Classic FM or seek refuge in silence which is, of course, unthinkable.
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TV review: One Night, BBC1

“Everything’s so bloody uphill, isn’t it?” whined kitchen salesman Ted (Douglas Hodge) upon realising that he’d left the charcoal for the evening's barbeque at the supermarket. But the charcoal wasn’t really the problem.
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Radio column: Portrait of the artist

For me, radio drama has always been a special form of torture. There's the tiny shoot of optimism that comes with the opening credits of a new play that invariably wilts into disappointment as the action unfolds.
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TV review: WikiLeaks - The Secret Life of a Superpower

If you’ve ever had that cold, clammy feeling following the realisation that an email, in which you have been less than flattering about a colleague, has accidentally landed in said colleague’s inbox, then you will have experienced roughly a millionth of the pain felt by assorted US government officials in the wake of the WikiLeaks scandal.
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Radio column: Sound and fury

Pity the poor radio presenters required to converse with the public on air. When they wrote "people person" on their job applications, they probably imagined themselves engaging in high-minded discussions with the likes of Niall Ferguson or Germaine Greer, not wrangling with the great unwashed about infinitesimal changes in the schedules.
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Radio column: Anxious Anneka doesn't rise to the challenge

"Well, here I am," said Anneka Rice, espressos lined up on the desk, nerves jangling audibly, at the crack of dawn on Saturday. The time was 6.05am and she was presenting a new breakfast show on Radio 2, taking over from Zoë Ball who, in fairness, is a tough act to follow.
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Radio column: Ships in the night are sleeper hits

If, like me, you have trouble sleeping; if at night your brain starts fidgeting in your skull like a recalcitrant toddler, pin-balling from one deranged thought to the next without a care for the exhausted body that houses it, then the radio is probably your best friend.
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Book review: Autobiography, By Mary Quant

Don't believe the old saw "If you can remember the Sixties, you weren't there". Mary Quant remembers everything and she was the Sixties, having single-handedly created the look – the miniskirts, the hotpants, the PVC macs, the skinny-ribbed sweaters – that defined Swinging London.
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Radio column: By royal appointment

The Art of Monarchy on Radio 4 began with a small black-and-white photograph. In it was a two-year-old girl standing in front of a large ivy-smothered house and staring daggers at the camera.
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Obituary: Whitney Houston

Whitney Houston, who has died at the age of 48, was a dazzling performer who blazed a trail for a new generation of black female singers, from Beyoncé Knowles to Mary J Blige. In her Eighties heyday, Houston became the queen of the power ballad and single-handedly invented the concept of the pop diva. Even the sappy production and anodyne lyrics of her biggest singles couldn't dent her reputation as an artist of unrivalled vocal talent.
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Stay The Night: Castaway Cottage, Whitstable

Fiona Sturges stayed at a stylish former fisherman's cottage and made sure the well-equipped kitchen enjoyed a good rest as well. Read more...

Papa don't preach: Older women still rock

Madonna's Super Bowl show has drawn criticism for nothing other than the material girl's age. Fiona Sturges is indignant
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Radio column: No domestic bliss from the suburban sitcoms

What pops into your head when you think of sitcoms? Middle-class households filled with Ikea furniture? Acne-dappled teenagers slumped on sofas delivering withering put-downs to their parents? Neighbours with personality disorders who don't knock before coming into the house? Scripts so rotten that their terrible stench lingers in the memory for years to come?
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Radio column: Balding's golden moments

I've never liked sport. As a person whose job basically involves listening to stuff, and whose spine has become embedded in the sofa like an ancient fossil, the last thing I want to do is have my nose rubbed in other people's physical accomplishments.
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Do The Doors still light your fire?

Few bands divide opinion like Jim Morrison's seminal Sixties outfit. As a commemorative DVD and album are released, two of our music critics offer opposing views.
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Radio column: The delights of a shore-fire success

How has Desert Island Discs done it? How has it survived decades of culls and re-branding to become a broadcasting institution, seemingly impervious to change and yet still crushing the competition with ease?
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Lana Del Rey: A beguiling beauty who's more than a one-hit wonder

Since the singer's Video Games became a YouTube hit, her backstory has been the target of endless sniping. Just enjoy the mesmerising music, says Fiona Sturges
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Radio column: I'm sorry, but the celebrity satirists haven't got a clue

Radio 2's Hot Gossip is a panel show hosted by Claudia Winkleman about celebrity tittle-tattle, but not in the shameless we-don't-care-if-you-think-we're-shallow sense. It is, in fact, propelled by shame.
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Radio column: The voice of the people - Derbyshire vs Vine

Victoria Derbyshire or Jeremy Vine? It's a bit like asking whether you're a cat or a dog person. If you are disposed to radio phone-in shows then chances are you have a preference.
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Book review: The Last Holiday: A Memoir, By Gil Scott-Heron

In the latter half of his life, Gil Scott-Heron was in bad shape. This once prolific, articulate and highly politicised writer and musician, best known for "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", had entered a creative cul-de-sac.
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Radio column: The stylus gurus spinning a good yarn

Being a radio DJ is a cinch nowadays. Where once upon a time a DJ had to haul crates of records into work, now they can simply take in their iPod, set it to shuffle and then lie down for an executive nap.
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