Programme Information

From his home in Perthshire, Desmond Carrington rummages through his collection of 250,000 titles and this week he remembers the American composer Howard Arlen, who wrote more than 400 songs including Over The Rainbow and Stormy Weather.

Presenter/Desmond Carrington, Producer/Dave Aylott

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

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In a few weeks' time, British film producer David Puttnam, with broadcaster and author Brian Sibley will be bringing the story of the first 100 years of cinema up to date. But for now, listeners can sit back, dim the lights and open the popcorn, as BBC Radio 2 re-broadcasts their original 1999 programme charting the history of the silver screen.

This programme considers Hollywood's favourite film genres: the western, the musical, the sci-fi epic and the war movie.

Contributors include Ken Annakin, (director of Battle Of The Bulge), Robert Wise, (director of The Day The Earth Stood Still), film critic and historian Leonard Maltin, director Fred Zinneman (High Noon) and lyricist Leslie Bricusse.

Presenters/David Puttman and Brian Sibley, Producer/Malcolm Prince

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

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Come Fly With Me – The Legacy Of Jimmy Van Heusen Ep 1/2

Tuesday 9 February

11.30pm-12.00midnight BBC RADIO 2

Songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen

Musician, novelist and stage writer Rupert Holmes considers the legacy of songwriter and pilot Jimmy Van Heusen, who wrote many hits for Frank Sinatra.

When Jimmy Van Heusen died 20 years ago, the world of American popular song lost one of its most individual characters. Van Heusen was a man who could combine fine composition with serial womanising in Hollywood, alongside piloting his own aircraft. He wrote 85 songs for his friend Frank Sinatra and his legacy is still felt today, with performers such as Michael Bublé, who has recorded a version of Call Me Irresponsible, having notable successes with his songs.

Van Heusen was born Edward Chester Babcock in 1913. He preferred music to school and worked for a time on a local radio station, composing songs for listeners. Eventually, after a name change, he made it to New York where he began writing hit songs like Polka Dots And Moonbeams. An invitation to Hollywood led to him composing songs for Bing Crosby's road movies and, along with Sammy Cahn, he wrote numbers such as Call Me Irresponsible and High Hopes.

In the first of this two-part series, Rupert Holmes explores Van Heusen's early career and his songwriting partnerships with bandleader Eddie DeLange and lyricist Johnny Burke, which produced hits such as Darn That Dream and Swinging On A Star.

Presenter/Rupert Holmes, Producer/Emma Kingsley

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

Listeners can enjoy the final concert in BBC Radio 3's broadcasts of Daniel Barenboim's Beethoven Piano Concerto cycle with his Berlin Staatskapelle at London's Southbank Centre. Tonight they perform Beethoven's final Fifth Piano Concerto coupled with Schoenberg's lushly late romantic Verklärte Nacht.

Beethoven finished work on this last and most imperious concerto in 1809, just as the walls of Vienna were collapsing before the inexorable might of Napoleon's invading armies. The composer's deafness meant he was no longer up to the job of performing the new work himself.

Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), based on a poem by Richard Dehmel, tells in music a woman's confession to her lover that she has become pregnant by another man.

Both Beethoven and Schoenberg are composers who simultaneously summarised the musical traditions that went before them while pointing to radical new developments.

Presenter/Catherine Bott, Producer/Brian Jackson

BBC Radio 3 Publicity

In a week that explores man's new-found self expression through words and numbers, Neil MacGregor describes the British Museum's most famous mathematical papyrus.

Neil describes how and why the ancient Egyptians were dealing with numbers around 1550BC. This papyrus contains 84 different calculations to help with various aspects of Egyptian life, from pyramid building to working out how much grain it takes to fatten a goose.

Neil describes it as "a crammer for a dazzling career in an ancient civil service."

Presenter/Neil MacGregor, Producer/Anthony Denselow

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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This series of Nature concludes with the second of two programmes exploring people's relationship with the landscape and the value of becoming familiar with "a local patch". Paul Evans begins by examining the personal benefits to be gained from connecting with the landscape and wildlife close to home.

He also explores the connections between observation, knowledge and conservation through Garden Birdwatch and other wildlife monitoring schemes.

Paul discovers that getting to know your local patch – whether it's the garden, the local park, or somewhere else in the neighbourhood – can have long-term benefits for both the individual, increasing a sense of well being, health and enjoyment – as well as having long-term benefits for conservation of wildlife and wild places.

With contributions from Professor Chris Baines, President of the Urban Wildlife Partnerships; Dr Ken Thompson, lecturer at the Department of Animal And Plant Sciences, University Of Sheffield; Mike Toms and Dawn Balmer, British Trust For Ornithology; Gemma Rogers, Royal Society For The Protection of Birds; and Richard Fox, Butterfly Conservation.

Presenter/Paul Evans, Producer/Sarah Blunt

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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Comedian Robert Webb plunders his bookshelves to present a selection of his favourite prose and poetry in a special edition of With Great Pleasure, recorded at the University Of Bedfordshire.

His selection includes the first piece of writing to make him laugh out loud and a poem that best captures his feelings in his newly acquired role as a father.

The readers are Abigail Burdess and Jonathan Dryden Taylor.

Presenter/Robert Webb, Producer/Paul Dodgson

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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Clarinettist and Cambridge English literature graduate Emma Johnson, combines her two passions in this analysis of the influence of John Milton senior on his famous poet son.

Musicologist and performer Richard Rastall has unearthed and recorded many of the elder Milton's pieces including choral, viol consort and song settings. Richard reveals to Emma what he's discovered and what it sounds like in specially reconstructed recordings of works unfamiliar to even scholars.

As well as revealing Milton the composer, this programme explores the life of the man and his relationship with his son. Although a gifted musician, Milton was not able to live on earnings from his compositions alone. A scrivener by trade, he managed to free himself from the Scriveners' Company in 1599 and was subsequently able to afford a private tutor for his son and provide for him when he took a place at St Paul's School and Christ's College, Cambridge. For much of this time the family lived in Bread Street, London. There is written evidence that Milton encouraged his son to be both a man of letters and music.

Emma also talks to Milton scholars and the early music group Fretwork, as they prepare and record John Milton's instrument works – and asks whether it is fanciful to hear in Milton junior's Il penseroso, a son's proud boast of his father's work.

Presenter/Emma Johnson, Producer/Tom Alban

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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The Wild West meets the wild West Riding of Yorkshire in Peter Spafford's Buffalo Bill And Little Matty Dyer.

Cardigan Fields, Leeds, 27 September 1903. Buffalo Bill, slayer of the Sioux, the most famous American in the world, disembarks at Armley station with his Wild West show: 500 horses; 800 cowboys and Indians; rough riders from Cossack Russia, Japan, Mexico; 50 cooks; 60 waiters; and 50 buffalo. The first-ever floodlit show, the Wild West will stay in Leeds just five days – long enough to change the life of Matty Dyer.

Matty is the 15-year-old son of the landlord of the local pub. He is in love with 19-year-old Jess, who works in the pub and doesn't take kindly to the attentions of McConnell the big-mouthed cowboy who has arrived with the troupe. But Jess doesn't really notice him – he's just Matty with a club foot, the young brother of her deceased fiancé, Sid.

Matty's other passion is for Native Indian lore – he has always preferred it to the cowboy legends. So when Matty witnesses prejudice against his new-found friend "Small Bear" he is prepared to stand up to McConnell and his hypocrisies. This doesn't sit well with his father who needs his cowboys to fill their boots and his pockets.

The cast stars Kerry Shale as Small Bear and Christian Foster (Lunch Monkeys) as Matty.

Producer/Gary Brown

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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Casual Cruelty Ep 1/3

Tuesday 9 to Thursday 11 February

3.30-3.45pm BBC RADIO 4

Casual Cruelty presents a trio of unique short stories by American author Shirley Jackson.

Writing from the Forties until her early death in the Sixties, Jackson's style of "creeping unease" was hugely popular. In recent years she has received increasing attention from literary critics and a new generation of readers. Her deceptively simple and apparently realistic style, often cloaking chilling or darkly hidden agendas, has influenced writers like Neil Gaiman and Stephen King.

Today, Stacy Keach reads her celebrated story, The Lottery, first published in the New Yorker in 1948. The inhabitants of a small farming community in Vermont gather each year for what becomes apparent is a rather different kind of lottery.

Tomorrow, Joanne Whalley reads Trial By Combat. Loneliness, and mysterious pilfering, in a humble New York boarding house are, perhaps, a strange method of seeking companionship.

On Thursday Glenne Headly reads The Villager, where there's pretence, and pretension in a Greenwich Village apartment in which furniture is for sale.

Readers/Stacy Keach, Joanne Whalley and Glenne Headly, Producer/Rosalind Ayres

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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At 16, Benjamin Cohen was at the heart of the dotcom boom during the late Nineties. Now no longer a dotcom millionaire, he confronts his past and finds the fate of the other teenage dotcom entrepreneurs. On 14 March 2000, Lastminute.com was floated on the London Stock Exchange. Benjamin Cohen remembers that day well. It was the day the British dotcom bubble began to deflate and his dreams of being a teenage tycoon began to crumble.

Now 10 years later he faces up to his past. He wants to find out what drove him to devote the adolescent years he could have spent as a normal teenager, poring over business plans and agonising over venture capital equity deals.

Today he is on the other side of the fence, a technology journalist for Channel 4. He recently interviewed the billionaire founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and found it strange that he was now the older journalist interviewing a 24-year-old whizzkid who has revolutionised the way many use the internet.

Benjamin also meets his peers, other former or current teenage dotcom millionaires. He wants to find out what they have in common; what draws them to technology businesses; how far they manipulate the media obsession with teenage millionaires for their own publicity; and whether they are shaped, even constricted, by it.

Presenter/Benjamin Cohen, Producer/Russell Finch

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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A Good Read Ep 1/8

Tuesday 9 February

4.30-5.00pm BBC RADIO 4

Sue MacGregor returns with a new series of A Good Read where she asks her guests what their favourite paperback is. There is just one rule – the book must be currently available in paperback so listeners' can get hold of it should they wish to.

The series kicks off with two lively guests, naturalist and broadcaster Chris Packham and writer and performer Stella Duffy.

Other guests in this series include singer-songwriter Richard Hawley; journalist and author India Knight; stand-up comedian Shazia Mirza; journalist and news presenter Ritula Shah; author Julia Blackburn; and broadcaster Gyles Brandreth.

Presenter/Sue MacGregor,
Producers/Beatrice Fenton, Toby Field, Tim Dee, Jolyon Jenkins and Mary Ward-Lowery

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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Fabulous Ep 1/4

Tuesday 9 February

11.00-11.30pm BBC RADIO 4

Comedian and actor Daisy Haggard

Daisy Haggard and Katy Brand return with a new series of Fabulous, with Olivia Colman, Anne Reid, Margaret Cabourn-Smith, Sally Grace and David Armand.

Faye (Daisy Haggard) is anxious. She knows that today's women are "Fabulous". They have the job, the house, the colour-co-ordinated capsule wardrobe; they cope with singledom, marriage and having kids with peanut allergies; and they all do it effortlessly, with nothing more than a copy of Prima and a poem by Pam Ayres to guide them. So Faye wonders why she can't pull it off.

Fabulous unearths the slightly unhinged madwoman that lurks behind this "having it all" fantasy. The series follows Faye as she tries to get through her day with her "fabulous" facade intact.

This third series finds Faye engaged and drowning in wedding plans. Edith (Olivia Colman) is now godmother to Kim's baby son, Dougal, something Kim has agreed to so that Edith doesn't tell the police that she tried to sell the unborn Dougal on the internet; and Denise (Katy Brand) has nominated herself head bridesmaid, much to Mother's disgust. All of which means that Faye's work and home lives are now inextricably inter-twined, leaving Faye with a whole new host of frustrations.

Producer/Simon Nicholls

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

5 Live Sport

Tuesday 9 February

7.00-10.30pm BBC RADIO 5 LIVE SPORT

Mark Chapman has all the day's sports news and at 7.45pm there's live commentary of Manchester City versus Bolton, plus reports from Fulham versus Burnley, Portsmouth versus Sunderland and Wigan versus Stoke in the Premier League, and updates from a full programme in the Championship.

Presenter/Mark Chapman Producer/Adrian Williams

BBC Radio 5 Live Publicity

Football

Tuesday 9 February

7.40-9.45pm BBC RADIO 5 LIVE SPORTS EXTRA

• www.bbc.co.uk/football

Listeners can enjoy uninterrupted commentary on one of the night's top matches in the Premier League.

Producer/Jen McAllister

BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra Publicity

Uber cool indie actress Zooey Deschanel and singer-songwriter M Ward have teamed up to create musical duo She & Him and join Lauren Laverne, live in session.

The band have just announced that their second album, Volume Two, will be released on 23 March. Written by Zooey and produced by M Ward, Volume Two is the follow up to the duo's critically acclaimed debut, Volume One.

Presenter/Lauren Laverne, Producer/Gary Bales

BBC 6 Music Publicity

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Gideon Coe's archive gems include concert tracks from Fields Of The Nephilim and archive session tracks from San Franciso indie-folk duo Dodos, Belle And Sebastian spin-off God Help The Girl and sultry Gallic jazz pop from Francoiz Breut.

Presenter/Gideon Coe, Producer/Frank Wilson

BBC 6 Music Publicity

Kenny and Jaggy go over the game plan for Saturday's match, but some of Kenny's comments seem to be more about the state of his marriage than about football, as the drama continues.

Later Simran invites Sandra to stay with them, but why is Jaggy worried?

Elsewhere, Nadia is concerned about Khatija refusing to go out. Is she ashamed of her daughter? Khatija denies this and changes the subject to Zenab's "snooping". Later Khatija can't sleep and tells Nadia how she really feels...

Kenny is played by Brian Croucher, Jaggy by Jay Kiyani, Simran by Balvinder Sopal, Sandra by Anita Dobson, Nadia by Sohm Kapila and Khatija by Miriam Ali.

BBC Asian Network Publicity