Comment: Enough, detox bores. Why don't you get a liver?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the fun is almost over, folks. It's that time of year when heady excess gives way to needy self-flagellation. Because no sooner has the Advocaat been drained and the last Lindor unfurled that someone starts banging on loudly about their internal cleansing rituals – involving kale, wheatgrass, and similar middle-class foodstuffs – and entreating all within hectoring distance to join them in their annual detox.

Radio column: British Borgen

"Why?" I howled at 30-second intervals during Borgen: Outside the Castle, this week's wholly pointless spin-off of the Danish television series on Radio 4. Three episodes in and I'm still at a loss.
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Radio column: Why World Service and Radio 4 led the field on Mandela

When a political giant and beacon of freedom dies, it is only natural that there will be a period of tribute and reminiscence. Late last week, sandwiched between the pre-prepared retrospectives across the world's media, there was no shortage of politicians, pundits and pop stars paying effusive tribute to the late Nelson Mandela, even when some of those selfsame politicians, pundits and pop stars had previously been on a jolly to South Africa paid for by an anti-sanctions lobby group; or voted against resolutions calling for Mandela's release; or broken the boycott of an apartheid regime for their own financial gain.
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Radio column: Tangled up in Dylan

Bob Dylan, I can take him or leave him. Sorry, but it's true. Oh I get that Bob is a big deal. You can bang on all you like about how he's a peerless songwriter and poet and maverick who changed popular culture for ever, and I will nod sagely in agreement.
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Radio column: A Little Britten

Let me begin with a disclaimer in the hope that it will absolve me from the daft, the ignorant, the downright imbecilic statements that are likely to follow. My knowledge of classical music is, to put it generously, sketchy. What I know about Benjamin Britten, the subject of Radio 3's latest season devoted to a single composer, wouldn't fill a Post-it note.
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Radio column: The child victims of war

"I must go to bed now as we have an early start in the morning," wrote 12-year-old Joyce Henderson in her diary on 31 Aug 1939. "Tomorrow, I become an evacuee and it's all because of something called war."
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Radio column: Jewel in the BBC crown

I can't remember the first time I heard From Our Own Correspondent on the radio. What I do recall is that it was part of the background noise of my childhood alongside the Blue Peter theme tune, the sound of farmyard animals and the words: "You're not going out dressed like that."
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Radio column: More torture than teenage kicks

"It's kind of kicking off," said Radio 1's Matt Edmondson, half an hour into his preamble to the annual Teen Awards that had already seemed to last for three days. "This is amazing, there are pop stars literally everywhere," panted his co-presenter Jameela Jamil, as if she had just clapped eyes on the Virgin Mary and not Jade from Little Mix.
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'How can you get into trouble for saying what is true?' Joan Collins talks man troubles, twerking and the problem with society today

I meet Joan Collins in Claridge's, because, let's face it, where else do you meet this long-serving star of stage and screen and epitome of old Hollywood glamour, who has more recently branched out into books and one-woman shows and – wait for it – her own brand of wigs?
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Radio column: Medical marvel gets the right treatment

I'm still trying to work out how, this week, I came to be transfixed by a podcast on the subject of tumours. There are, I'm sure, cheerier ways to pass a weekend, such as shaking the crumbs out of the toaster or tying down one's dustbins in preparation for the not-quite storm of the century.
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Essay: Why Lady Gaga still deserves our applause

It’s a rite that has sustained the arts since time immemorial: the delirious hyping of bright new stars as they first emerge, only for them to be flayed alive for daring to reach the top.
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Book review: Autobiography, By Morrissey

“It’s time the tale were told,” sang Morrissey on The Smiths’ “Reel Around The Fountain”, and almost 30 years later he has finally done it in a mammoth memoir that, on account of appearing as a Penguin Classic, has caused a commotion well before publication. Few could really be surprised; this is typical Morrissey hubris, similar to the time that he insisted his solo records go out on EMI’s HMV imprint, which then dealt exclusively in classical music.
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Music review: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Brighton Dome

There is a school of thought that says rock is a young person’s game, that when a musician reaches a certain age, their choice of career ceases to be either interesting or dignified. Nick Cave, along with his peerless supporting cast of Bad Seeds, blows such notions sky-high.
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Radio column: Hitting the high notes

In the early years of rock'n'roll, any young British musician hoping to make their mark on the world relied on radio to get them to the top. And when I say radio, of course I mean the BBC. Because, whether you were accustomed to playing to one man and his dog in a suburban boozer, or packing them in at the 100 Club, it was there that the "arbiters of musical propriety", as Pete Paphides called them in Radio 4's Auditioning for Auntie, got the final word as to whether your music would be heard by the masses.
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Radio column: A lecture that is passionate and fun

"This must be the first time in the 65-year history of Reith," said Sue Lawley, introducing the Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry, "that a cross-dresser has been the lecturer."
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Radio column: Insights in the dark of human nature

"I used to call her names, swear at her," recalled "Stuart", as he had consented to be called, about his relationship with his girlfriend. "I've hit her... and given her a black eye... I've punched her in the face a few times and kicked her in the legs." This was just one of the recollections of a man who had spent years terrorising his partner in The Abuser's Tale, a study of domestic abuse on BBC Five Live's Victoria Derbyshire.
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Radio column: A quest to define the indefinable

Trying to explain the concept of irony can get you into hot water. When I recently told my six-year-old that it meant saying one thing and meaning the opposite, she replied, quite reasonably, "But why not say the thing you mean?"
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Comment: Stoptober, Movember, Mecember? Charitable fundraising has become a self-centred affair

You’ll have heard of Stoptober, a national health initiative in which smokers kick the habit during October and, in many cases, raise money for charity while doing so. You’re probably familiar with Movember too, since there’s no avoiding the goof in the office chortling about his “hilarious” new moustache that he hopes makes him look like a Mexican bandit, while pressing send on yet another “Please donate...” email.
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Book review: Wild Tales, by Graham Nash

Graham Nash’s book is as much a lesson in pop history as it is a warts-and-all memoir. The co-founder of The Hollies, he made it out of post-war poverty in Manchester with a series of hits including “Carrie Anne”, “Simple Man” and “Marrakesh Express”, before becoming a leading light in the Laurel Canyon folk scene alongside collaborators David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, and his then lover, Joni Mitchell.
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Comment: Mumford & Sons make the case for being not seen and not heard

There has been much whooping over the announcement that banjo-loving folkies Mumford & Sons have reached an “indefinite hiatus”. Mumford-bashing has, of course, become something of a national sport. Look at them with their private educations and their Wurzels’ waistcoats, the daft chumps!
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Comment: Sandwich blog has surprising aftertaste

On reading about Stephanie Smith, the blogger and New York Post reporter who pledged to make 300 sandwiches for her boyfriend, Eric, in exchange for a marriage proposal, I felt a little surge of smugness. Thank God, I thought to myself, my bloke is suitably evolved that he knows that if he wants a sandwich he has to go to the fridge. He also knows that if he wants the fridge to contain sandwich-making material he needs to visit a supermarket first. These are concepts that have never had to be explained. Ain't life grand?
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Radio column: Magic mix of music and movies

I love music and I love film. You might say they are my main passions in life if you don't count disco nail varnish and the pulled-pork sandwiches served in the pub opposite my house. So several weeks ago when the BBC announced a season of programmes called Sound of Cinema to be rolled out across both TV and radio, I let out a little cheer and blocked out a large chunk of my September diary with the reminders: "comfy clothes", "snacks" and "Radio 3".
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It’s not just a rumour: Fleetwood Mac are back

Fleetwood Mac may have had their ups and downs but they sure know a thing or two about timing. Last year singer Stevie Nicks told Rolling Stone that 2013 would be “the year of Fleetwood Mac”. And so it has proved. Thirty-six years on from their 40 million-selling album Rumours, a languid, harmony-laden work about heartbreak which now resides in one in six US households, the Mac are back on top.
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Radio column: Watts's royal appointment

It's possible that when the actress Naomi Watts, ensconced in a suite at Claridge's, donned a set of headphones to speak to Radio 5 Live's Simon Mayo for an interview, she had already read the abominable reviews for the film, Diana, that she was supposed to be promoting and thought to herself: "Why bother?" Or it could be that room service had arrived earlier than expected – and given the choice between Simon Mayo and a plate of macaroons, well, it's a tough one even for the most committed self-publicist.
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Radio column: Broadcasting from the cancer ward

"Hear the inspiring story of the man with terminal cancer who achieved his goal as a magician and comedian," went the blurb for Richard Bacon's show on BBC Radio 5 Live. Oh God, I thought. Must we? You see, I had imagined, in a cynical moment, a kind of queasy Bucket List-style scenario in which a pale-faced man in surgical gowns and smothered in tubing is wheeled on to a stage in order to pull a rabbit out of a hat for the last time as the audience howl in tear-stained approval, possibly with choirs of angels looking on.
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Book review: Fairyland, by Alysia Abbott

When two-year-old Alysia Abbott's mother died in 1973 it was assumed that she would be adopted by her aunt Janet. A child needs a mother, so the thinking goes, and the one thing that Alysia didn't need according to her extended family and America's legislating bodies, was a homosexual father.
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Radio column: Working-class heroes

Summer's over, the kids are back at school and Radio 4's has blown the budget on a new drama season. When I first heard about the station's revival of British New Wave I adopted my best excited face. I mean, just look at the people involved – James Purefoy, Emily Watson, Sheridan Smith and John Thomson. But then I remembered that this is Radio 4, for much of the time a repository for the kind of half-arsed, sketchily drawn drama that makes the TV soap Doctors look like Ibsen.
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'I was doing this before you were born': Yoko Ono on Lennon, infidelity and making music in her eighties

I always knew she was small but, even so, I'm not quite prepared for how teeny and bird-like Yoko Ono is. Or, come to think of it, how glamorous. The home movies taken by her and Lennon in the 1970s reveal a figure with big, fluffy hair and pensive, wary features. But the woman sitting next to me is smiling broadly and is stylishly clad in dark jeans, tight black sweater and chunky boots. Her hair is cropped and spiky and her signature sunglasses sit halfway down her nose, her eyes twinkling over the top. She is part rock star, part sexy librarian.
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Radio column: Dark side of the tunes

You only needed to watch the animated trailer for Darkside – that's right, a trailer, with images, for radio. What madness is this? – to know it was going to be totally off its box. A toy farmer stood staring at the skies; giant angle grinders sliced up the earth; a figure sat on a hospital bed with a massive propeller where his head should be.
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Radio column: Culture-clash comics reunited

Regular Radio 4 listeners will already know The Reunion, the programme that has been picking at old scabs and offering moist-eyed snapshots of times gone by since 2006. It's about revisiting crowning glories and ghastly calamities of old, with the wonderful, and sometimes awful, benefit of hindsight. Like Desert Island Discs, it has a distinct format: a group of people are brought together to recall a shared moment in their lifetimes. Unlike DID, however, there is more scope for sadness, for joy, or for sheer, red-faced fury.
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Radio column: Slice of life

We're now into week two of the mid-summer period known as "the radio doldrums." If you need to know more about this annual event, may I please refer you to last week's column in which I whined at length about holidaying presenters leaving their shows in the hands of imbeciles, and about all the dreadful-sounding programmes I had declined to listen to for fear that I might slip into a radio-induced coma.
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Radio column: Beautiful minds

This is an abominable time of year for the radio listener. Early August is when the big-name presenters pack up and sod off to the Seychelles, leaving their shows in the hands of the unqualified and confused. It's a time when the interns run riot, and when producers press the big button marked "pre-recorded tat" and disappear off for a nap.
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Lucky man: Legendary hit-maker Nile Rodgers on disco, drugs and Daft Punk

In his 61 years, Nile Rodgers has endured more than his fair share of trauma. There were his mother and stepfather, both heroin-addicted and given to nodding off mid-sentence; the teenage homelessness that led him to sleep on subway trains; his own addictions to alcohol and cocaine, which prompted his heart to stop eight times; and, most recently, a diagnosis of prostate cancer. Yet only once has he ever wondered whether life was worth living.
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Book review: The World Is Ever Changing, by Nicolas Roeg

Nicolas Roeg's book isn't about his rise to fame as one of Britain's most distinctive film directors. Nor is it a confessional on the inner workings of the movie industry, or an exposé on the many stars – among them Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Julie Christie – with whom he has worked. In fact, it's possible that this isn't the tell-all that Roeg's publishers had in mind. It is, however, a gem that offers intriguing and often lyrical insight into the artist at work.
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Radio column: Culture of work

"Over the last two centuries, offices have changed the way we live as well as the way we work", it was revealed in Lucy Kellaway's History of Office Life on Radio 4. I'll say. Ten years ago, I worked in an office where I had co-workers and a range of respectable clothing. Now I'm a home worker whose colleagues are feline, and whose sartorial style is best described as "boho bag lady".
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Radio column: Sound women

It's official: the gender imbalance is on radio is real, and it's a problem. Of course, for those of us in possession of both ears and ovaries, this is hardly breaking news. But for the benefit of all the knuckle-dragging nitwits who like their ironing done by someone else and who say we should stop whining because we have Radio 4's Woman's Hour – a whole hour! Every day! Entirely to ourselves! – it's now here in black and white.
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Radio column: This American Life

I love BBC radio as much as anyone but every now and then I wake up and think to myself, "Today is not a John Humphrys day. Neither is it a Victoria Derbyshire day. And if I have to hear Roger Bolton placating another listener aggrieved by a rogue split infinitive on Feedback, I honestly can't be responsible for my actions." On those days, I go online and listen to This American Life.
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Comment: Another day, another TV heroine brutalised

There are times, after a long day's work, when I'd rather not see a woman tied to a bedpost, her skirt fetchingly hitched up around her thighs, being slowly strangled to death. Neither, if I'm honest, do I relish the sight of 19th-century prostitutes lying prone in east London alleyways, their fallopian tubes splattered all the way to The Strand. And forgive me if I am less than joyful at watching a successful working woman being anally raped by her bitter, emasculated husband.
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Radio column: Restoring the faith

There are those, I am told, who believe Saturday Live represents all that is wrong with Radio 4. They say that it is staid and slow moving, a distillation of the station's Boden-loving, middle-aged and irretrievably middle-class values. Specifically, it's a weekend show for the terminally tragic. To which I say, "Pffft! Off you go then, children, to the land of Saturday-morning youth entertainment, with its shouty presenters and ghastly "banter" and guest spots from Rizzle Kicks". Me? I'm embracing middle age and indulging my desire to be subjected to only gentle murmuring from ex-pop star vicars before midday. 
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Book review: I Laughed, I Cried, by Viv Groskop

As a teenager the journalist Viv Groskop dreamed of being a stand-up comedian but life, along with the need for proper paid work, got in the way. Years later, as a mother of three approaching middle age, she set herself a challenge: 100 gigs in 100 days. At the end of it, she would know for sure whether stand-up was a viable career move or merely a pipe dream. 
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Radio column: Blown away by a brush with death

When it comes to science it doesn't take a lot to blow my mind. I'm still reeling from what happens when you chuck a load of Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke (if you haven't done it, you have yet to witness one of life's miracles). So I've got a lot of time for the long-running Radio 4 show The Infinite Monkey Cage, a programme that manages to simultaneously expand your brain power while lulling you into thinking you're chuckling away at a panel show for simpletons.
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Radio column: Sold a dummy

I've been putting off listening to Radio 5 Live's Bump Club with Edith Bowman and Colin Murray for some time. You might even say I've been giving it a wide berth (ho ho). Why? Well there's the problem of the name. Bump Club sounds to me like a Cath Kidston-smothered NCT get-together complete with Keep Calm... coffee mugs, a knitted uterus and couples cooing over sinister 3D ultrasound photos. It has an air of wholesomeness and exclusivity about it, a gathering of the ferociously fertile.
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Book review: Anyone Who Had a Heart, by Burt Bacharach

Burt Bacharach, the Grammy and Oscar-winning composer famed for hits including "Walk On By", "What's New Pussycat?" and "Do You Know The Way to San José", certainly has some tales to tell. There's the time he found Marlene Dietrich in his hotel room washing his socks. There's also the time he was invited to perform at a reception at the White House, during which President Reagan fell into a deep sleep.
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Radio column: Thinking allowed

There are times, with Radio 4, when the only way to listen is while lying horizontal in a darkened room with a cold compress on your head. I find this to be requirement while spending half an hour in the company of Melvyn Bragg as he pontificates over the concepts behind Dutch humanism or prophecy in the Abrahamic religions at 9 o'clock in the morning straight after the three-hour hard-news assault that is the Today programme.
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Music review: Rihanna, Millennium Stadium, Cardiff

Massive stadium shows by massive stadium-filling pop stars tend to come with a concept. When fans are paying upwards of £60 a ticket, it pays to put in some effort and go all out on spectacle. Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Madonna festoon their shows with fireworks, crazy hydraulics, "meaningful" am-dram narratives and a vast supporting cast of choirs, dancers, and circus performers. Rihanna, who has had more No 1 singles than Beyoncé and Gaga combined, does none of this. Rihanna's concept is her vagina. 
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Comment: The art of artistic conversation

It's possible that, when the Welsh actor Rhys Ifans gave "the interview from hell" to a journalist from The Times recently, he was having an off day. It's possible, as his people subsequently claimed, that a combination of medication and some unspecified bad news had made him behave out of character. It's also possible that, as a man who tells an interviewer to "fuck off", that he's "bored with you. Bored. Bored", and then exits in a rage, that Ifans is a rude, self-regarding pain in the backside who joins that exclusive club of stars (members include Tommy Lee Jones, Lou Reed, Philip Seymour Hoffman) that all that the most masochistic journalists would swim through molten lava to avoid.
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Radio column: Healing the human mind

"It was a very small room, 10 by 15 feet, without light, without a door," said the mayor of Bangalore, recalling the moment last October when he watched a man with schizophrenia being rescued from 10 years of solitary confinement in his family home outside the Indian city. "(There was) one very small window, it was kept only to feed him," the mayor continued. "You wouldn't even call it a room as there was no exit. There was no way for him to get out. It was not a room that was locked, there was a wall all around him."
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Radio column: The stuff of dreams

I'm not quite sure how I missed Radio 4's Wireless Nights the first time around. This is the late-night, awards-strewn show in which the Pulp frontman-turned-national treasure Jarvis Cocker reveals the peculiar stuff that British people get up to under cover of darkness. (Oh, stop it, not that).

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Theatre review: How To Host a Dinner Party, Brighton Fringe

The Sussex company Park Bench Dance Theatre’s show opens with two barefoot, smartly dressed women shuffling on to a empty stage with a dining table. They disappear again and return with some chairs. A long and wordless tussle ensues in which identical dining chairs are shifted and swapped, shunted and dragged, and swapped and shifted again.
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"If you want to know about me and Morrissey, Google it."

Around half an hour into my conversation with Johnny Marr, things take a distinctly awkward turn. Up until this point, the hallowed ex-Smiths guitarist-turned-serial collaborator-turned-solo artist has been warm, chatty, full of sunshine and bonhomie. As we are introduced, I mention that we met once before about 10 years ago and Marr – looking sharp in dark jeans, Crombie-style coat, his hair sculpted into the customary Mod cut – does a valiant job of pretending to remember.
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Theatre review: The Kite Runner, Brighton Festival

It was always going to be a tall order bringing Khaled Hosseini’s mega-selling 2003 novel about friendship, betrayal and exile to the stage.
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Music review: The Great Escape, Brighton

It’s hard to shake the feeling that The Great Escape, the annual three-day gigathon for new bands and Brighton’s answer to Texas’s South-By-South-West, has grown too unwieldy for its own good. Certainly, the queues outside venues that snake all the way to Eastbourne offer little hope to the majority of seeing the year’s buzz bands such as The Strypes, Swim Deep or Parquet Courts.

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Comedy review: Daniel Kitson, Brighton Festival

Daniel Kitson’s new show is a reflection on reality, memory and our sense of self. Hardly wall-to-wall giggles, you might think, but this publicity-shy, TV-shunning, Perrier Award-winning comic’s talent lies in burrowing into the human psyche and dispensing profound nuggets through tales in which, more often than not, he is the hapless protagonist. After The Beginning, Before The End is like a TED talk with added LOLs.
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Radio column: Attenborough goes down a tweet

Did I awake at two minutes to six on Monday morning – a Bank Holiday, no less – to hear David Attenborough's inaugural Tweet of the Day on Radio 4, so as to bring you a wholly authentic report of the listening experience? Did I heck.
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Radio column: CBC's WireTap

I might, in the past, have mentioned my struggles with radio comedy. In writing this column, I have put myself through immeasurable torture – that is, listening to a parade of stand-ups bleating about traffic wardens, missing socks and sagging genitalia in the late-night slot – in the hope that somebody might cajole my face into something approximating a smile.
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Radio column: Maths and music

Can pop music be reduced to a mathematical equation? I'd prefer to think not. In my wistful moments, while listening to The Smiths' "What Difference Does It Make?", or Eels' "A Daisy Through Concrete", or Laura Veirs' "Galaxies", I'd rather not imagine smart alec songwriters using X's and Y's to send these wondrous sonic shards tearing through my vital organs. I need to know that tears have been shed, that souls have been broken and blood has been spilt to create these songs that can reduce me to weeping, snot-smothered fool in seconds.
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Radio column: An epic survey of sound

"Now you're talking," I thought as I checked out the blurb for Radio 4's Noise: a Human History, a mega-series told in 30 parts. If the likes of The Listening Project and The People's Songs – both hugely ambitious and beautifully made socio-historical documents – are anything to go by, size really does matter in radio.
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Book review: Mom & Me & Mom, by Maya Angelou

There is violence in Maya Angelou's new book. There is also sorrow and bitterness and pain. But mainly there is love. Mom & Me & Mom is about a bond between mother and daughter that is slow to come, ferociously hard-won, very nearly lost, but, in the end, indestructible.
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Radio column: Overcoming prejudices

Until now, I've always had the World Service and Radio 4 down as the places to look for hard-hitting, politically challenging documentaries. You know the kind. The ones that can deposit you, still in your dressing gown and slippers, into the middle of a sub-Saharan war zone, or a Bolivian coke factory, and deliver a sharp punch to the guts any time your concentration might be in danger of drifting off.
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Radio column: Brand rolls with it

“I'm high as a kite,” declared Russell Brand breathlessly. “I've drunk a whole lot of caffeinated beverages to get me in the mood.”

I suspect the top brass at XFM – which has the distinction of being the first radio station to fire him after he read out pornography live on air – were in the market from something stronger to steady their nerves as Brand, alongside Noel Gallagher and a selection of guests, began a one-off, three-hour stint to raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust.

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Radio column: What women want

On Sunday morning, I awoke to the sound of Clare Balding, she of horse-racing, memoir-writing, Olympics-presenting, Crufts-championing, quiz-show hosting, moorland-yomping and general switch-on-the-box-and-there-she-is-again fame.
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Devendra Banhart: 'I was singing as a woman when I was a child'

Devendra Banhart is having a cry. Not a huge one. One small tear and it's over. "I told you this would happen," he says, blinking. "Didn't I tell you?"

It's true, he did. An hour earlier, shortly after Banhart finished an interview with the radio presenter Lauren Laverne on BBC6 Music, during which his mind appeared to be elsewhere, he told me: "I find talking out loud, even to my friends, really difficult. And my friends would tell you that I will cry eventually. Not because I'm self-conscious. I know I'm an idiot and there's a liberating aspect to that. I just get teary at the most inopportune moments. It's like, because it's not really the time or place to be doing that, it just sort of happens."

Like farting?

"Exactly."

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Radio column: Bottling up

"What did you buy?" asked Victoria Derbyshire. 

"A bottle of gin," replied Rachel.

"And where did you drink it?"

"The first mouthful would have been in the toilet at Tesco... Then I went to a hotel."

"And drank the rest of the bottle?"

"I presume so, yes. I blacked out."

And so the cycle began again.

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Book Review: How Many Camels are There in Holland? By Phyllida Law

The title of the actress Phyllida Law's book refers to a question that dementia specialists put to their patients to help determine whether they have Alzheimer's. Law spent two years caring for her nonagenarian mother, Mego, in the tiny Scottish village of Ardentinny, with occasional help from friends, fellow villagers, and her daughter, the actresses Emma and Sophie Thompson.  Mego's memory was already failing when her husband Arthur died. She had been known to put her shoes in the oven and bacon in her sock drawer. Now she was brushing her teeth with shampoo and trying to exit a room via the window rather than the door. "Mother was lost," says Law.

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Radio column: The problem with comedy

"And here on 4 we have a comedy coming up," said the BBC continuity announcer. Oh God, I thought. Really? Must you? Must we? Isn't it time to give up? To admit defeat? To say to your listeners "Look guys, we've given comedy our best shot, we've brought in the big guns, we've maxed out the budget, but it's just not working." And, let’s be honest, it rarely has. The glory days of Steve Coogan and Chris Morris are long gone. With the exceptions of Just a Minute and anything involving David Sedaris, comedy and radio simply do not mix. In fact, they are sworn enemies.  Radio is where comedy goes to die.

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How We Met: Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell

'She told me she had an extra ticket; I went the next day and stayed for seven years.'

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Radio column: Tony Harrison's V

In the summer of 1972 Alice Cooper, the fright-wigged shock-rocker, sent Mary Whitehouse, the blue-rinsed umbrage-taker, a bunch of flowers along with a note of thanks. Through the latter's vociferous campaigning to have Cooper's single "School's Out" banned from Top of the Pops, she inadvertently propelled it to the top of the charts. 
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Radio column: Confessions of a castaway

My plan this week was to write about science. Honestly, it was. The World Service was running a series of solemn-sounding talks called Exchanges at the Frontier, each delivered by leading epidemiologists, physiologists and other miscellaneous ologists whose job titles were very possibly made up. However bleak their message, I felt it my duty to hear them out. And listening on Sunday morning, for a while I was genuinely concerned about the plight of humankind in the face of horrible mutating viruses that could knock out much of population and possibly leave pigs and poultry to run things.
But that was before my brain started to ache, my eyeballs began rolling into the back of my head and, just for a second or two, I switched channels and happened upon the writer Julie Burchill on Desert Island Discs squeaking: "I'd been up for three nights taking cocaine, so when Morrissey called I didn't want to see anybody. I was quite rude to him and he left." At which point there was really no going back.
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Radio column - Hitting the right notes

I'll admit it, the title of Radio 2's latest mega-series, The People's Songs, had me worried. Surely even the BBC has worked out that when it comes to music "the people" cannot be trusted. Remember when Radio 2 listeners deemed Robbie Williams' "Angels" the best song of the past 25 years at the Brits? I was there and, I can tell you, the sight of inebriated industry nobs trying to wipe the WTF expressions off their faces as the cameras swooped in for close-ups was very special indeed.
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Book review: Bedsit Disco Queen, by Tracey Thorn

If Tracey Thorn were starting out in music today, she wouldn't stand a chance. This isn't meant as an insult. It's simply that, despite having maintained a career for the best part of 30 years, and enjoyed a fistful of hits as the singer of Everything But the Girl alongside her boyfriend and musical partner Ben Watt, Thorn doesn't really do the pop star thing. As she says in her memoir: "It (has) always been a strange thing for me to be doing, a job I wasn't really cut out for."
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Radio column: Animal magic

What did George Orwell ever do for us? I mean besides giving us TV's Big Brother, in which fame-hungry nobodies lie around on designer furniture picking their toenails, and Room 101, in which fame-hungry nearly-nobodies prattle on about stuff that gets on their wick. We're probably only a commissioning meeting away from a reality series in which the cast of TOWIE are dressed up as four-legged creatures and sent to work on a farm, under the über-strict gaze of Sir Alan Sugar's Napoleon.
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Radio column: The big chill

How badly are you feeling the chill? Have goose pimples lent your skin the texture of a cheese-grater? Have your eyeballs frozen over and your nipples retreated inwards? Are you wearing so many layers of clothing that the only thing that separates you from the crazy bird lady in Mary Poppins is, well, the birds? 
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Radio column: Grief encounter

Death weighed heavily on the radio this week. Well, why wouldn't it? It's January, it's cold out, the boiler's packed up, train fares have rocketed, pensions are being slashed, the Coalition's still in charge and next Monday is, we're told, the most depressing day of the year. Life bloody sucks.
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Radio column: Saturday morning fever

"In another life I would have been out on the road DJing and dragging a record box around in the middle of the night in some shady club," remarked Mary Anne Hobbs at the start of her new weekend breakfast show on BBC6 Music.

Hobbs was referring to her last job as a club DJ, one of her many working incarnations that have also included Sounds journalist, Radio 1 Breezeblock stalwart and presenter on XFM. In recent years, when most people her age are putting the kettle on and warming up the telly in readiness for Saturday Kitchen, Hobbs has been packing up the decks, waving goodbye to the boggle-eyed masses and crawling home to her bed.

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Radio column: Firecrackers and fur coats

"Are you looking for a job?" James Naughtie asked Dame Ann Leslie on Radio 4's Today, a note of panic in his voice. Now there's an idea. As one of the programme's guest editors, Leslie, the veteran foreign correspondent who famously went to war in a fur coat, arrived like a blast of cold air in a sticky sauna. You can imagine plenty of previous guests proffering feature ideas cobbled together by their agents, but not Leslie. She was first in the office, her sleeves rolled up and ready to kick some serious butt.
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