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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