There are weeks when television schedules feel like an exercise in filling space, and then there are weeks like this one, when there is almost too much worth watching.My first highlight is John Simpson: 60 Years at the BBC on Tuesday. Simpson has spent six decades reporting from some of the most dangerous and politically significant places on earth, and whatever one thinks of the BBC at any given moment, there is something remarkable about a career that has stretched from the newsroom of 1966 to the role of world affairs editor today.
I am also very pleased to see Sky Arts bringing back Classic Movies. Programmes which treat cinema seriously — looking at how films were made, what they meant in their own time and why they still matter — are always welcome. The new series begins with A Matter of Life and Death, Powell and Pressburger’s extraordinary 1946 fantasy. If you have Sky Arts, this looks like a series worth following.
My third choice is the revived Play for Today on Channel 5. I loved the original Play for Today, and television badly needs spaces where writers can tell self-contained stories about contemporary life without everything having to become an eight-part franchise. This week’s hospital drama sounds particularly timely.
There is plenty beyond those three. We have political intrigue in The Party, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, a strong run of films ranging from The Ipcress File and Don’t Look Now to Poor Things and American Fiction, and some intriguing streaming choices — not least Tenzing, which finally attempts to put Tenzing Norgay at the centre of the Everest story.
Saturday 10 October
The Man in the White Suit — Talking Pictures, 1.40pm
One of the great Ealing comedies, but with rather more bite than the word “comedy” might suggest. Alec Guinness plays a chemist who invents a fabric that apparently never wears out and never gets dirty. Wonderful news for consumers, you might think. Less wonderful for manufacturers and workers whose livelihoods depend upon clothes eventually needing to be replaced.
The film is funny, ingenious and surprisingly sharp about the conflict between technological progress and economic self-interest. More than seventy years later, its central question has not gone away: what happens when an invention that ought to improve everybody’s life threatens the structures on which employment and profit depend?
A Few Good Men — Channel 4, 7.30pm
Rob Reiner’s courtroom drama remains immensely watchable. Tom Cruise plays the young military lawyer defending two Marines accused of murder, while Jack Nicholson supplies one of the most memorable performances of his career as Colonel Nathan Jessup.
Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue gives everybody a little more eloquence than real life generally permits, but the film works because beneath all the verbal fireworks lies a serious argument about authority, obedience and responsibility. When does following orders cease to be a defence?
40 Hits of 1976 at the BBC — BBC Two, 8.40pm
1976 may have been one of the strangest years British pop ever produced. The Sex Pistols appeared, Thin Lizzy were in full flight, Joan Armatrading was making her mark and Wings were enormous. Yet the year’s bestselling single was Brotherhood of Man’s Eurovision winner Save Your Kisses for Me, while the Wurzels somehow drove a combine harvester all the way to number one.
This archive compilation embraces the contradictions. Elton John and Kiki Dee, Cliff Richard, the Rolling Stones and a double helping of ABBA are also promised. A splendid reminder that pop history never develops as neatly as later documentaries pretend.
Poor Things — Channel 4, 10pm
Yorgos Lanthimos’s fantastical 2023 film is visually extravagant, funny, disturbing and determined to wrong-foot the viewer. Emma Stone plays Bella Baxter, brought back to life through the experiments of Willem Dafoe’s grotesque but oddly sympathetic scientist.
What begins like a warped Frankenstein story turns into something much broader about freedom, sexuality, education and the ways society tries to discipline women who refuse to behave as expected. Not a film for everybody, certainly, but impossible to accuse of timidity.
Brief History of a Family — BBC Two, 1.55am
One of the more intriguing films tucked away in the small hours this week, Brief History of a Family is a quietly disquieting Chinese drama from 2024 that turns a seemingly ordinary act of kindness into something increasingly difficult to read. When a prosperous middle-class couple welcome their teenage son’s new friend into their home, the arrangement appears harmless enough. Yet as the young stranger becomes woven into the fabric of family life, subtle tensions begin to emerge, shifting the film into darker and less predictable territory.
Director Lin Jianjie resists easy answers, allowing unease to build gradually through glances, silences and small changes in behaviour rather than dramatic revelations. Beneath its measured surface, the film probes questions of privilege, parental expectation, status and belonging, examining how fragile a sense of security can be when an outsider enters a carefully constructed world. It is an intelligent, unsettling piece.
Sunday 11 October
The Ipcress File — BBC Two, 1.10pm
Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer offered a very different kind of spy from James Bond. He wears glasses, cooks, complains about bureaucracy and exists in a world where espionage is less about casinos and cocktails than forms, filing cabinets and people lying to one another in shabby rooms.
Sidney J. Furie’s 1965 film still looks terrific, and Caine’s understated performance established Palmer as one of British cinema’s great anti-heroes.
Funeral in Berlin — BBC Two, 2.55pm
Caine returns as Harry Palmer in the 1966 sequel, this time becoming entangled in Cold War manoeuvring surrounding the proposed defection of a Soviet intelligence officer.
The Berlin setting gives the film an appropriately divided, suspicious atmosphere. Nobody quite trusts anybody else, which is exactly how a decent Cold War thriller should operate.
The Party — ITV1, 9pm
The first of five episodes of a new political drama starring Luke Evans and Joanna Scanlan.
At the centre is politician Ben Fitzmorris, played by Tom Cullen, whose lavish birthday celebration is thrown into chaos when news arrives that the Conservative leader has resigned. Suddenly the party is no longer merely a party. His rival Jarvis Conrad, played by Sam Troughton, intends to stand for the leadership, and ambition begins to rearrange the room.
Political dramas work best when the personal and ideological become impossible to separate. This has the ingredients for exactly that sort of story. It continues through the week.
Lesley Manville Remembers Top Girls — BBC Four, 10pm
Lesley Manville looks back at her leading role in the BBC’s 1991 production of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls.
It is a useful introduction to one of the most important British plays of the post-war period, and a reminder of an era when challenging theatre was routinely given serious space on television.
Top Girls — BBC Four, 10.15pm
Churchill’s play begins with one of modern theatre’s great conceits: Marlene hosts a celebratory dinner attended by women drawn from different centuries and cultures.
It is funny, argumentative and deliberately uncomfortable. Beneath the apparent celebration of female achievement lies a much more difficult examination of class, ambition and the price that somebody else may pay for individual success.
T2 Trainspotting — Film4, 10.40pm
What emerges is not simply a sequel but a reckoning. The anarchic energy and swagger of youth are still present in flashes, but they now sit alongside disappointment, regret and the uncomfortable realisation that the future imagined in your twenties rarely arrives in quite the form expected. Nostalgia runs through the film from beginning to end, woven into its imagery, soundtrack and self-references, yet Boyle treats it with suspicion rather than affection. He recognises the temptation to romanticise the past while quietly exposing how selective memory can be.
There are moments of humour, bursts of violence and enough kinetic style to remind viewers why the original became such a cultural landmark, but the film’s real strength lies in its melancholy. These are men confronting the consequences of who they were, and who they failed to become. Far from feeling like an unnecessary revisit, T2 Trainspotting becomes a thoughtful meditation on ageing, friendship and the uneasy relationship between memory and reality. It lacks the raw shock of the 1996 original, but it gains something arguably more interesting: perspective.
Don’t Look Now — BBC Two, 10.45pm
Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 masterpiece remains one of the most disturbing British films ever made.
Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play a grieving couple in Venice after the death of their daughter. Roeg turns the city into a maze of glimpsed figures, reflections, warnings and possible supernatural intervention.
It is often described as a horror film, and it is, but grief is its real subject.
Passing — Film4, 1am
Rebecca Hall’s elegant adaptation of Nella Larsen’s novel stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as two Black women whose lives intersect in 1920s New York.
The title refers to racial passing, but the film is equally interested in identity, desire, class and the different selves people construct in order to survive.
Monday 12 October
Panorama: Roman Abramovich — How He Hid His Fortune — BBC One, 8pm
Panorama turns its attention to Roman Abramovich and the structures reportedly used to conceal and protect his wealth.
The interesting question with programmes of this kind is rarely simply how rich somebody is. It is how global wealth moves, who administers it, and how fortunes can be placed beyond ordinary public scrutiny.
Clickbait Clinic with Stacey Dooley — BBC One, 8.30pm
Episode four asks: Is it dangerous to boost my testosterone?
Dooley continues examining the mixture of online advice, influencer culture and dubious health claims which increasingly shapes how people understand their own bodies.
Being Muslim After 9/11 — BBC Two, 9pm
Twenty-five years after the attacks of 11 September 2001, filmmakers Mobeen Azhar and Masood Khan return to their archives and reconnect with British Muslims they have encountered over the years.
The programme explores belonging, identity and the way life in Britain changed after 9/11. There has now been a generation of adults who have never known a world before the politics generated by those attacks. That alone makes this an important subject.
The Party — ITV1, 9pm
Episode two of five as the leadership struggle gathers momentum.
The Sky at Night: Space for Different Perspectives — BBC Four, 10pm
Maggie Aderin explores the effect dyslexia has had on her own life and scientific career, while meeting other scientists with the condition.
The Sky at Night has lasted because it has always understood that astronomy is not simply a collection of facts about distant objects. It is also about the people trying to understand them.
Reflecting Skin — BBC Four, 10.30pm
Bonnie Greer examines depictions of Black people in Western art.
That means looking not simply at who appears in paintings, but at who was allowed to be an individual, who became a symbol and who was pushed into the background.
American Fiction — BBC Two, 11.05pm
Jeffrey Wright is superb as frustrated novelist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, who writes a deliberately exaggerated book full of racial stereotypes only to watch the literary establishment embrace it.
Cord Jefferson’s film is very funny about publishing fashions and liberal self-congratulation, but it is also a thoughtful family drama. The satire bites because the characters remain recognisably human.
Misbehaviour — BBC One, 11.10pm
The 1970 Miss World competition is often remembered for the moment activists from the women’s liberation movement stormed the stage and disrupted one of the most watched television broadcasts on the planet. Misbehaviour revisits that flashpoint, but wisely avoids reducing it to a simple battle between heroes and villains. Instead, the film explores a far more complicated moment in social history, one in which competing ideas about progress, equality and representation were colliding in full view of the public.
Featuring a strong ensemble cast that includes Keira Knightley, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Jessie Buckley, the film balances humour, drama and political debate with a relatively light touch. Its greatest achievement is recognising that several different struggles were unfolding simultaneously. While campaigners challenged the sexism embedded in beauty pageants, other voices were drawing attention to questions of race, opportunity and visibility. The film gives space to those overlapping perspectives, acknowledging that the meaning of liberation was far from universally agreed.
Rather than presenting history as a settled argument, Misbehaviour treats it as an ongoing conversation, one whose tensions still feel surprisingly relevant. The result is an engaging and thoughtful drama that entertains while encouraging viewers to look beyond the headlines and consider the wider social forces at work. As ever with late-night BBC scheduling, broadcast times can differ across the nations, so it is worth checking local listings before settling in for the evening.
Tuesday 13 October
John Simpson in 1985
John Simpson: 60 Years at the BBC — BBC Two, 9pm
One of my picks of the week.
John Simpson began work at the BBC in 1966 and eventually became its world affairs editor. His career has taken him through wars, revolutions, dictatorships and many of the defining international stories of the last six decades.
There will inevitably be plenty of extraordinary archive footage, but what makes this particularly interesting is the opportunity to see how foreign reporting itself has changed. The technology is different, the news cycle is faster and the pressures on journalism have multiplied. Simpson has been around long enough to have witnessed that transformation first-hand.
Storyville: Ask E. Jean — BBC Four, 10pm
A documentary about journalist, author and longtime advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.
Carroll became internationally known far beyond the readership of her advice columns, but Storyville is generally at its best when it takes a familiar public figure and restores the complexity flattened out by headlines.
L.A. Confidential — Film4, 12.45am
Few Hollywood crime films from the 1990s have aged quite as well as L.A. Confidential. Curtis Hanson’s adaptation of James Ellroy’s sprawling novel delivers all the pleasures of a classic noir while giving them a modern sharpness. Set in 1950s Los Angeles, it follows three very different police officers, played by Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce and Kevin Spacey, whose separate investigations gradually converge on a web of corruption, violence and deception stretching far beyond anything they initially imagined.
What makes the film so compelling is the contrast between image and reality. Hanson presents a city bathed in sunshine, lined with palm trees and wrapped in the glamour of the movie industry. Celebrity culture thrives, politicians talk of progress, and Los Angeles sells itself as a vision of post-war success. Yet beneath that polished surface lurks something considerably darker. Organised crime, police misconduct, media manipulation and institutional rot are never far away, and the film steadily peels back each layer with remarkable confidence.
The cast is exceptional throughout. Crowe brings a bruising physicality to the hot-headed Bud White, Pearce gives Ed Exley an ambition that is never entirely admirable, while Spacey clearly relishes the chance to play the smooth and media-savvy Jack Vincennes. None of them fit neatly into the role of hero, which is part of the film’s enduring appeal. Every character is compromised in some way, forced to navigate a world where the line between justice and self-interest grows increasingly blurred.
Beautifully written, richly acted and impeccably constructed, L.A. Confidential remains one of the finest neo-noirs of the modern era. It may look like a love letter to old Hollywood at first glance, but it is really an examination of the myths America tells itself and the corruption hidden behind them. Stylish, intelligent and relentlessly engrossing, it rewards every revisit.
Wednesday 14 October
Obsession — Talking Pictures, 4.05pm
Edward Dmytryk’s 1949 British thriller, also known as The Hidden Room, features Robert Newton as a psychiatrist plotting an elaborate revenge against his wife’s lover.
It is precisely the sort of film Talking Pictures is so valuable for keeping in circulation: clever, tightly constructed British cinema which might otherwise disappear from television altogether.
Fellow Travelers: You’re Wonderful — Channel 4, 10pm
The opening episode of an eight-part drama following two men who fall in love in 1950s Washington.
Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer star in a story which stretches across four decades of American political history, beginning during the period of persecution usually associated with the Lavender Scare.
Political history here is not background decoration. Government policy reaches directly into private lives.
Janet Suzman Remembers The Singing Detective — BBC Four, 10pm
Janet Suzman looks back at Dennis Potter’s extraordinary television drama.
There are television programmes which are fondly remembered and then there are programmes which changed expectations about what the medium could actually do. The Singing Detective belongs firmly in the second category.
The Singing Detective: Skin — BBC Four, 10.15pm
There was a time when British television regularly expected audiences to meet it halfway, and few writers embodied that confidence more completely than Dennis Potter. The Singing Detective remains one of his greatest achievements, and “Skin”, the opening episode, immediately throws viewers into a world where certainty is in short supply. Michael Gambon stars as mystery writer Philip Marlow, confined to a hospital bed by a severe and agonising skin condition, his body failing him even as his imagination refuses to remain under control.
What follows is neither straightforward drama nor conventional mystery. Memories drift into fantasies, fictional characters wander into real life, songs interrupt scenes without warning, and fragments of Marlow’s past begin surfacing in ways that are often unsettling. Potter trusts viewers to navigate the chaos, gradually piecing together connections for themselves rather than having everything neatly explained. It can be disorientating at first, but that is very much the point. The series places audiences inside a mind struggling to separate lived experience from invention.
Gambon’s performance is extraordinary, capturing both the bitterness and vulnerability of a man trapped by pain, regret and memory. Around him, Potter constructs something that feels at once deeply personal and remarkably ambitious, using television to explore questions of identity, childhood, creativity and self-deception. Decades on, it remains startlingly original, not because it is difficult for the sake of being difficult, but because it dares to treat viewers as intelligent participants rather than passive spectators.
Modern television drama is often praised for its complexity, yet much of it remains careful to explain itself. The Singing Detective belongs to a tradition that was far less concerned with providing a map. Potter assumed audiences would keep up, make connections and occasionally get lost along the way. Television could do with a little more of that faith in its viewers today.
Fellow Travelers: Bulletproof — Channel 4, 11.25pm
Episode two. As the State Department investigates suspected homosexuals, fear begins to dictate behaviour and Hawk distances himself from Tim.
The cruelty of such persecution lay partly in the way the state forced people to police not only themselves but one another.
The Singing Detective: Heat — BBC Four, 11.25pm
Marlowe clashes with a psychiatrist as Potter continues dismantling the boundaries between memory and imagination.
Thursday 15 October
Hidden Figures — Film4, 6.30pm
A hugely enjoyable account of the Black female mathematicians whose work helped NASA during the American space programme.
Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe lead the cast. The film follows a familiar inspirational template, but the underlying story is so extraordinary that it earns its emotional impact.
Monty Don’s British Gardens — BBC Two, 8pm
Monty Don travels through northern England and Northern Ireland looking at gardens and landscapes, including an urban park and an alleyway transformed into a peaceful green space.
The best gardening television is really about the relationship between people and place, and Don understands that better than most.
Classic Movies: The Story of A Matter of Life and Death — Sky Arts, 8pm
The start of a new series which I would recommend to anyone interested in film.
This edition looks at Powell and Pressburger’s magnificent 1946 A Matter of Life and Death, starring David Niven and Kim Hunter. Niven plays an RAF pilot who survives when he apparently should have died and subsequently finds himself required to argue his case before a celestial court.
There are obvious similarities to Heaven Can Wait and other supernatural fantasies, but Powell and Pressburger made something uniquely British — romantic, philosophical, technically adventurous and visually astonishing.
Programmes which take the time to explain why films matter are becoming rarer. Classic Movies deserves support.
Friday 16 October
Humans in the Loop — Channel 4, 4am
A 2024 film exploring artificial intelligence through the people whose largely invisible labour helps make automated systems possible.
That title is important. The mythology surrounding AI often suggests autonomous machines operating independently of human beings. In reality, there are frequently people somewhere in the system doing the labelling, checking and correcting.
The Martian — Film4, 6.45pm
Matt Damon gets stranded on Mars and applies science, stubbornness and potatoes to the problem.
Ridley Scott’s film succeeds because it is unusually optimistic about intelligence and cooperation. Scientists solve problems. Engineers improvise. People work together. In modern cinema that can feel almost revolutionary.
Play for Today — Channel 5, 9.05pm
Episode four of six in Channel 5’s revived anthology.
This week an overworked nurse named Ria battles exhaustion, guilt and old mistakes during a chaotic night on an understaffed hospital ward.
I have a particular affection for the old Play for Today. Its great virtue was that television drama could respond to ordinary life — work, class, family, politics — without first having to invent a detective or promise seven more series.
So I am delighted Channel 5 has revived the idea. Long may it continue.
Disco at the BBC Volume One — BBC Four, 9.15pm
BBC Four opens a night devoted to disco with archive performances including Chic, Rose Royce and LaBelle.
There are worse ways to spend a Friday night.
The First Omen — Film4, 9.30pm
Horror prequels have a habit of answering questions that never really needed answering in the first place. Too often they exist to fill gaps in mythology rather than justify their own existence. The First Omen, however, manages something more substantial. Set before the events of Richard Donner’s 1976 classic, it explores the sinister circumstances surrounding the arrival of the child who will eventually become cinema’s most infamous adoptive son.
Rather than relying solely on references to familiar characters and story beats, director Arkasha Stevenson focuses on atmosphere. From the outset, a sense of unease hangs over the film like a gathering storm. The Rome of the early 1970s is presented as a place of crumbling certainties and hidden agendas, where religious authority, fear and manipulation intertwine in ways that become increasingly disturbing. The horror is often psychological before it becomes explicit, allowing tension to accumulate scene by scene rather than rushing from one shock to the next.
What distinguishes the film from many modern franchise extensions is its confidence. It understands that dread is often more effective than explanation, even while expanding the mythology of the original. There are moments of genuine discomfort and a visual style that draws heavily on the religious and occult horror films of the era in which The Omen first emerged.
Prequels rarely escape comparison with the works that inspired them, and The First Omen is no exception. Yet the praise it received was largely earned. While it inevitably adds detail to a story that once thrived on mystery, it does so without losing sight of what made the original so unsettling. More importantly, it creates an atmosphere of mounting dread that lingers long after the closing credits, which is ultimately what good horror should do.
Donna Summer at Top of the Pops — BBC Four, 10.15pm
A collection of Top of the Pops appearances from one of disco’s defining voices.
Summer’s records with Giorgio Moroder did more than fill dancefloors. They helped shape electronic pop for decades afterwards.
Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution — Rock the Boat — BBC Four, 10.45pm
The evening continues with the story of disco as a global musical and cultural phenomenon.
Disco’s subsequent caricature as lightweight party music has always obscured a much richer history involving race, sexuality, underground club culture and technological change.
In Fabric — BBC Two, 11.50pm
Peter Strickland turns a red dress into the centrepiece of a strange, darkly comic horror story.
It is part ghost story, part satire on retail culture and part affectionate recreation of the peculiar atmosphere of old department-store advertising. Very odd indeed — which is meant as praise.
Streaming
Tyson — Netflix, from Tuesday 13 October
All four episodes are available together.
The documentary series examines the extraordinary life of Mike Tyson, one of heavyweight boxing’s most frightening fighters and one of sport’s most complicated public figures.
Tyson’s story has everything that attracts documentary makers — poverty, sudden wealth, sporting brilliance, celebrity, violence, scandal and reinvention. The challenge will be resisting the temptation to turn all that into a simple rise-and-fall narrative.
The Diplomat, Season 4 — Netflix, from Thursday 15 October
The political drama returns for a fourth season.
Its appeal has always come from combining international diplomacy with the far messier politics of marriage, ambition and personality. The machinery of state may be enormous, but it is still operated by flawed human beings.
The Disciple: A Wu-Tang Fable — Netflix, from Friday 16 October
The true story of an outsider whose sheer determination eventually carried him into the inner circle of the Wu-Tang Clan.
The Wu-Tang story has already generated plenty of mythology, so a film approaching that world from its margins rather than through its most famous members could offer something different.
Walter Presents: Soviet Jeans — Channel 4 Streaming, from Friday 16 October
All eight episodes are available.
Soviet Latvia, 1979. Renars attracts the attention of the KGB and finds himself confined to a psychiatric hospital. There, together with fellow inmates, he develops a wonderfully subversive enterprise: manufacturing counterfeit Levi’s jeans.
That premise alone earns it a look. Western jeans were not merely clothing behind the Iron Curtain. They could signify rebellion, access to forbidden culture and an entire alternative world. Turning their manufacture into an act of resistance gives this Latvian series an irresistible starting point.
Tenzing — Apple TV, from Friday 16 October
Radio
10–16 October 2026
Radio offers a particularly varied selection this week, ranging from the psychedelic experiments of the Grateful Dead to the political theatre of David Edgar, with opera, detective fiction, revolutionary history and some interesting examinations of our relationship with the natural world along the way. There is plenty here to stimulate the imagination, and more than a little to provoke argument.
Saturday 10 October
The Lady in the Lake – 6am, 11am and 5pm, BBC Radio 4 Extra
Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe returns in The Lady in the Lake, and that is reason enough for me to tune in. I’ve always had a particular affection for Marlowe and for film noir generally. There is something irresistible about Chandler’s world of private detectives, crooked businessmen, glamorous women and moral corruption lurking beneath the respectable surface of American society.
What distinguishes Marlowe from the ordinary fictional detective is his voice. Chandler gave him some of the sharpest dialogue in crime fiction. His wisecracks can be wonderfully funny, but beneath the cynicism there is a man trying to maintain his own rather battered code of honour in a thoroughly dishonest world. Marlowe may be a hard-boiled detective, but he is also, in his own way, something of a romantic.
The Lady in the Lake finds him investigating a disappearance that leads into a complicated tangle of murder and deception. As with the best Chandler mysteries, the pleasure lies as much in the atmosphere, characters and dialogue as in the solution to the crime. Radio is a particularly suitable medium for his writing because so much depends on what people say, and what they carefully avoid saying.
Opera on 3: Bellini’s I Puritani – 6pm, BBC Radio 3
Vincenzo Bellini’s final opera, I Puritani, is an unusual work in several respects, not least because its romantic drama unfolds against the background of the English Civil War.
The central relationship is between Elvira, whose family supports the Puritan cause, and Arturo, a Royalist. Their love becomes entangled in the political and religious divisions of seventeenth-century England. It is a setting that might seem surprising for an Italian composer writing in the 1830s, although the conflict provides an effective background for a story of loyalty, jealousy, misunderstanding and emotional suffering.
Bellini was one of the great masters of bel canto, and the opera contains some extraordinarily demanding and beautiful vocal writing. He was less interested in exploring the finer points of English constitutional history than in using political division to heighten the emotional struggles of his characters.
Nevertheless, the setting adds something distinctive. Here is a love story taking place when political convictions could divide families and determine people’s fates. There is a certain timelessness about that predicament.
Archive on 4: The Grateful Dead Are More Important Than the Beatles – 8pm, BBC Radio 4
Now there is a title calculated to provoke an argument! The Beatles transformed popular music, influenced an entire generation and left behind songs that have become part of the cultural furniture. To suggest that the Grateful Dead were more important is quite a claim.
But this documentary is not simply an exercise in comparing records or arguing over which band wrote the better songs. Its proposition is rather more interesting. The Grateful Dead, who emerged from the American counterculture of the 1960s and remained active until the 1990s, anticipated important features of the world in which we now live.
Unlike most major rock acts, the Dead encouraged fans to record and circulate their concerts. Their performances were never quite the same from one night to the next, with improvisation occupying a central place in their music. Around the band developed an extraordinary community of followers who shared recordings, information and experiences.
The documentary argues that the group’s values and methods anticipated an age of freely circulating music, networked communities and information sharing. There is also a connection with the emerging ideas of cybernetics and the technological experimentation taking place around the Californian counterculture.
It is a fascinating argument. The Beatles may have been the more influential musicians in conventional terms, but perhaps the Grateful Dead were anticipating the way culture itself would eventually be produced, distributed and consumed.
Of course, the idea that music should be freely shared raises difficult questions about how musicians earn their living. Nevertheless, the programme promises a stimulating examination of a band whose influence extended far beyond their recordings.
Sunday 11 October
Grandchildren of the ’56 Revolution – 7.15pm, BBC Radio 4
Seventy years ago this month, Hungarians rose against Soviet domination in an uprising that briefly appeared capable of changing the course of their country’s history.
The revolution of October 1956 began with demonstrations and demands for reform but rapidly developed into a much wider revolt against the Soviet-backed communist government. When Soviet forces intervened decisively in November, the uprising was crushed, thousands were killed and large numbers of Hungarians fled abroad.
For many in the West, the events were a defining moment in the history of the Cold War. They also caused a crisis within the international communist movement, as people who had previously defended the Soviet Union struggled to justify the use of tanks against workers and students demanding greater freedom.
This documentary examines the legacy of those events through subsequent generations. It is a particularly interesting subject because the meaning of 1956 remains contested in modern Hungary. The memory of the uprising has become entangled with contemporary political arguments, while the commemoration of individual protesters and their aspirations has often been selective.
History is rarely simply about what happened. It is also about who gets to tell the story afterwards, which figures are celebrated and which inconvenient details are quietly forgotten. The grandchildren of the revolutionaries are inheriting not just family memories but arguments about the meaning of freedom, national independence and political resistance.
Monday 12 October
The Conversation: The Healing Power of Nature – 1.30pm and 10.30pm, BBC World Service
There is something deeply attractive about the idea that spending time in wild places can restore our physical and mental equilibrium. Yet the reality of immersing oneself in nature is often more demanding than the reassuring images of tranquil forests and peaceful lakes might suggest.
This edition of The Conversation brings together two remarkable women whose experiences have taken them far beyond the comforts of ordinary life.
Dutch explorer and environmental biologist Arita Baaijens has travelled extensively through remote landscapes and spent time living alongside nomadic communities in the Sahara. Her experiences raise interesting questions about how different cultures understand their relationship with the natural world, and whether modern Western society has lost something important through its separation from it.
Brigid Lowe, meanwhile, undertook the extraordinary challenge of swimming in every loch in Scotland. That is quite an ambition, particularly considering the temperature of Scottish waters! Her journey provides another perspective on our relationship with wild landscapes, combining physical endurance with the pleasures and occasional discomforts of direct contact with nature.
Both women have encountered uplifting experiences, but also difficulties and dangers. That makes their discussion potentially more valuable than the simplistic suggestion that nature is always comforting.
The natural world is not a therapeutic playground created for our convenience. It can be beautiful, indifferent, dangerous and inspiring, sometimes all at once. Perhaps it is precisely that independence from human concerns which makes encountering it so valuable.
Tuesday 13 October
In the Studio: Hildur Guðnadóttir – 1.30pm and 10.30pm, BBC World Service
I have a particular interest in this programme because I love the cello, an instrument capable of expressing an extraordinary range of human emotions. Its rich, resonant sound can convey melancholy, warmth, tension and something approaching the quality of the human voice.
The Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir has made especially imaginative use of the instrument in a musical career that has increasingly attracted international recognition.
She won an Academy Award for her score to Joker and an Emmy for her work on the television series Chernobyl. Both soundtracks demonstrated her remarkable ability to create atmosphere through music that can be unsettling, deeply emotional and intensely physical.
Presenter Susan Marling visits Guðnadóttir in her Berlin studio to explore her creative methods and experimental approach to composition. Particular attention is given to her work on the theatrical production Electra/Persona, starring Cate Blanchett.
The collaboration is especially interesting because Guðnadóttir also worked on the 2022 film Tár, in which Blanchett played a celebrated conductor whose personal and professional life begins to unravel.
What appeals to me about Guðnadóttir is her willingness to explore the expressive possibilities of sound rather than simply composing conventional melodies to accompany dramatic action. Her music often seems to emerge from the physical properties of the instruments themselves.
This should provide a fascinating glimpse into the creative life of a composer who has helped to redefine what contemporary film and dramatic music can achieve.
Maydays – 2.15pm, BBC Radio 4
David Edgar is a playwright whose career I have followed with considerable interest, particularly because of his political preoccupations. Few British dramatists have examined ideological movements, political allegiances and the contradictions of the left and right with quite the same persistence.
Maydays is a particularly intriguing example of his work. It follows Martin Glass, a former public schoolboy who embraces revolutionary socialism during the political ferment of the 1960s. As the decades pass, his idealism gives way to disillusionment. He establishes himself in journalism and eventually moves towards the political right during the 1980s.
The story explores a phenomenon that has always interested me: why people change their political convictions, sometimes dramatically. Are such changes the result of intellectual development, personal disappointment, changing circumstances or simply the attractions of power and career advancement? Edgar is interested in how personal experience interacts with larger historical developments.
There is an autobiographical resonance too. Edgar himself attended Oundle School, near Peterborough, before becoming involved in radical politics.
I particularly admire his play Destiny, which examined the emergence of the National Front and the social and political tensions that helped sustain it. Another of his works, Events Following the Closure of a Motorcycle Factory (1976), was inspired by the workers’ occupation of the Triumph motorcycle factory at Meriden, near Coventry. Rather than accepting the closure of their workplace, the workers fought to preserve production and eventually established a co-operative. It is the sort of industrial struggle that deserved dramatic treatment, raising important questions about ownership, workers’ control and the defence of manufacturing jobs.
Edgar has also enjoyed considerable mainstream success, most notably with his acclaimed Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of Dickens’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. This enormous theatrical undertaking demonstrated his ability to combine political and social themes with popular storytelling on an ambitious scale.
What makes Maydays especially interesting is that it does not simply portray political idealism as heroic or its abandonment as betrayal. It examines the conflicts, contradictions and personal compromises that can shape an individual’s political journey.
At a time when political allegiances continue to shift in unpredictable directions, Edgar’s exploration of the passage from revolutionary socialism to the right feels remarkably relevant.
Thursday 15 October
The Dream Academy – 9.30am and 8.05pm, BBC World Service
Sleep is one of our most fundamental human needs, yet it is something modern society frequently seems determined to disregard.
Insomnia is the subject of this documentary, which examines the difficulties experienced by people who struggle to obtain sufficient rest. According to a survey cited in the programme’s publicity from 2024, around a third of the world’s population is not getting enough sleep. Japan is identified as a country where the problem is particularly acute.
It is not difficult to see why sleep deprivation has become such an important issue. Long working hours, irregular shifts, electronic devices and the pressure to remain constantly available all contribute to a culture in which rest is too often regarded as an indulgence rather than a necessity.
For many people, however, the problem is not simply finding enough time to sleep. Insomnia can persist even when the opportunity for rest is available, creating a distressing cycle of exhaustion and anxiety.
The consequences can extend well beyond feeling tired the following morning. Poor sleep can affect concentration, emotional wellbeing, physical health and people’s ability to function safely at work.
I welcome serious consideration of this subject because it rarely receives the attention it deserves. We spend a great deal of time discussing diet and exercise, both entirely worthwhile subjects, but sleep is every bit as fundamental to human wellbeing.
Perhaps we also need to examine whether the demands of modern working life are compatible with the biological needs of the people expected to meet them.
Friday 16 October
The Food Programme: Regenerative Farming – 11am, BBC Radio 4
This is a subject that has interested me for some time. Regenerative farming is based on a deceptively simple principle: agricultural land should be managed in ways that preserve and improve the health of the soil rather than progressively exhausting it.
Modern agriculture has achieved enormous increases in food production, but some intensive methods have come at a considerable environmental cost. Soil degradation, erosion, declining biodiversity and the loss of organic matter are among the problems that have prompted growing interest in alternative approaches.
Regenerative farming encompasses a variety of techniques, including reducing soil disturbance, maintaining ground cover, growing diverse crops, integrating livestock where appropriate and encouraging the natural processes that support healthy ecosystems.
The relationship between soil quality and the nutritional value of food is particularly interesting. Plants depend upon nutrients in the soil, although the precise relationship between farming methods and the nutritional content of the food we eat is complex. What is beyond dispute is that healthy, functioning soil is essential to sustainable food production.
For too long, agriculture has often been approached primarily in terms of maximising immediate yields, without paying sufficient attention to the long-term condition of the land.
One positive contribution made by the growth of environmentalism, including the Green movement, has been to encourage a more serious public discussion about where our food comes from and how it is produced.
That discussion extends beyond farming techniques to food supply chains, biodiversity, water quality and the wider environmental consequences of industrial agriculture.
There are legitimate questions about how regenerative techniques can be introduced economically and whether particular practices deliver all the benefits sometimes claimed for them. Farmers must, after all, be able to earn a living while producing food at prices people can afford.
But the underlying argument is compelling. Soil is not an inexhaustible resource, and treating it as though it were one makes little sense.
It is encouraging to see these issues receiving attention through The Food Programme. The way we look after the land is inseparable from the future of our food supply. That ought to concern all of us.
Selections and reviews by Pat Harrington
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