Programme Information

Jonathan Ross is joined by actors and impressionists Jon Culshaw and Debra Stephenson in today's programme. There's also live music from Strictly Come Dancing's newest judge, Alesha Dixon, who releases her latest album, The Alesha Show – Encore, this month.

Presenter/Jonathan Ross, Producer/Fiona Day

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

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BBC Radio 2 presenter Dermot O'Leary

Dermot O'Leary introduces live tracks from Robbie Williams and Liam Finn in this week's programme.

Williams's high-profile return to the public eye included a Guinness World Record for the most simultaneous cinematic screenings of his BBC Electric Proms concert for BBC Radio 1. His latest offering, Reality Killed The Video Star, was produced by Trevor Horn and released earlier this month.

Liam Finn, the son of Split Enz and Crowded House's Neil Finn, recorded, produced and mixed his solo debut album, Champagne In Seashells. He is currently in the middle of a tour that takes him to London and sees him supporting Pearl Jam and Ben Harper in his native Australia. His live performances feature looping guitar parts, bass lines and theremin to create "bombastic walls of sound".

Presenter/Dermot O'Leary, Producer/Ben Walker

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The American rock band Bon Jovi perform a special concert recorded earlier this month for BBC Radio 2. The live set, recorded at the BBC's Radio Theatre, features classic hits and tracks from the band's new album, The Circle.

Producer/Paul Long

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While travelling in Peru at age 32, Texan country singer-songwriter Sam Baker took a train ride that would change his life. On a clear, cool morning in Cuzco in the summer of 1986, Sam boarded a passenger train that was blown up minutes later by terrorists. This week, Bob Harris tells Sam's extraordinary story and offers listeners an opportunity to hear his beautiful music when he plays acoustically After Midnight.

Presenter/Bob Harris, Producer/Mark Simpson

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

Composer Richard Rodney Bennett talks to Tom Service about his childhood love of the "Great American Songbook", his experience in Paris as Boulez's first pupil and early career as a serialist composer.

Tom also visits the home of impresarios Victor and Lilian Hochhauser as they receive an award from the Royal Academy of Dance to mark their lifetime contribution to dance in Britain. The award recognises their work as promoters of major international artists and ballet companies, including the Kirov and Bolshoi, since their first UK tours in the Sixties.

Ahead of a residency at London's South Bank Centre, violinist Leonidas Kavakos talks to Tom about his concept of "Source" – the inspiration which lies at the heart of all great music based on folk music – the music of JS Bach, spirituality and silence.

And as New York-based composer Lukas Ligeti embarks on his first series of UK concerts, Tom talks to him about carving out a unique musical language under the weight of his father, György Ligeti's, legacy.

Presenter/Tom Service, Producer/Jeremy Evans

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Looking forward to her appearance at the London Jazz Festival, Dame Cleo Laine joins Alyn Shipton to select some of the finest recorded performances from her distinguished career.

Presenter and Producer/Alyn Shipton

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Hungarian maverick, composer György Ligeti

By the late Seventies, the opera house was the last place any self-respecting avant-garde composer wanted to be. But Hungarian maverick György Ligeti was never one to follow a trend and, by the time he'd finished Le grand macabre, he'd achieved what he'd done many times before; something completely unexpected and original.

What Ligeti called his "anti-anti-opera" is, in fact, very much in the tradition of Grand Opera. From the start, when a cheeky prelude for motor horns takes off the fanfare from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, listeners are in for a roller-coaster ride, rich in allusion and reference to the operatic repertoire, taking in Verdi, Mozart, Offenbach and Mussorgsky (among others) along the way.

The plot could hardly be simpler. The action takes place in Breughelland – a kind of timeless dystopia, peopled more by caricatures than characters, among them a drunk, a pair of lovers, a cuckolded husband and sexually voracious wife, corrupt and foul-mouthed politicians and a corpulent prince. Into this world of sex, violence and greed comes Le grand macabre, apparently the Grim Reaper himself. He promises the end of the world but, falling into a drunken stupor, he singularly fails to deliver.

Presenter/Ivan Hewett, Producer/David Papp

BBC Radio 3 Publicity

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Composer Elizabeth Purnell has created a soundscape for Rimbaud's work A Season In Hell, which was written between April and August 1873 in London and France, when Rimbaud was 18 and in the throes of an intense, transgressive and destructive relationship with Verlaine.

Purnell's setting includes composed music, field recordings and processed sound in a raw response to the words. She set the poems specifically for Robert Wyatt, whose voice, in its high, delicate register, suggests a beyond-the-grave alter-ego to the young Rimbaud.

A mixture of autobiography and enigmatic dream sequence, A Season In Hell sees Rimbaud look back in despair over his life as a poet, combining lucid self-appraisal and hyper-realism with demented vision and hallucinatory surrealism. The 25 pages of A Season In Hell – cut here to a third of its length – are both a staggering testimony to and a tortured recantation of Rimbaud's poetic credo, the "disordering of all the senses".

Narrator/Carl Prekopp, Producer/Sara Davies

BBC Radio 3 Publicity

Singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading is fascinated by the office of Lord Mayor of London, so she sets out to find out how someone becomes Lord Mayor and what the post really involves.

In this programme, broadcast on the day of the Lord Mayor's show, Joan presents her view of what it's really like to be Lord Mayor, having shadowed the outgoing mayor over several months. And she finds out if she could ever hold the position of Lord Mayor of London.

During that time she experiences the banquets, the ancient rituals, the fancy car, the City guilds and societies and the prize-giving ceremonies.

Presenter/Joan Armatrading, Producer/Susan Marling

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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Premièred at the National Theatre a year after the breaching of the Berlin Wall, David Edgar's play, The Shape Of The Table, tracks the collapse of an Eastern Bloc government at the end of 1989.

As the old regime retreats, former political prisoners and disgraced professors join students and banned writers around a negotiating table, charged with the task of shaping the future of the country.

In this version of the play, revised for BBC Radio 4 by Edgar himself, Tim McInnerny stars as Pavel Prus, the writer who leads the alliance calling for change; Henry Goodman plays Josef Lutz, the old-style Communist leader trying to hang on to control of both the Party and the State; and Jeremy Clyde and Jonathan Keeble feature as Kaplan and Vladislav, government ministers who realise that if something doesn't change, they are finished. Michael Elwyn plays Spassov – the reforming leader who was deposed 20 years ago, but who returns to be a symbolic hero of the new revolution.

Edgar's powerful play charts the dramatic and dangerous transition of a fictional Eastern European country from hard-line Communism to the beginnings of Western-style democracy. It is 1989, crowds are gathering in the streets, and the Soviets are refusing to send in the troops. The government is on its own and faces a stark choice: suppress the demonstrators or instigate reform.

Producer/Peter Leslie Wild

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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BBC Radio 4 continues to recreate 1989 in sound – drawing on the BBC and other news archive and music of the time. The daily programmes, presented by Sir John Tusa, re-trace the year's major political, cultural and social events as they happened.

In this week's news archive from 1989, the then Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd crosses the Berlin Wall and South Africa's President announces the country's beaches are to be opened to all races. A Labour peer declares that the possibilities of catching Aids through heterosexual relations is statistically invisible and Prague police beat protestors calling for reforms and the ousting of the Czech leadership.

Bulgaria witnesses its biggest demonstrations in 40 years, European leaders meet to discuss the reshaping of Europe and, in Prague, rumours spread that the police have killed a Czech student.

In London, ambulance workers continue their strike; New Kids On The Block reach No. 1; and, in Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu receives 67 standing ovations during his six-hour speech as he refuses to take note of the changes sweeping Eastern Europe. US Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney announces the scaling back of troop numbers in Eastern Europe.

In El Salvador, as rebels continue to occupy the Sheraton Hotel, the manager tells the BBC that everything is under control; and television cameras are permitted into the House of Commons.

Lebanon's President Muawad is killed 17 days after being elected and, in Prague, tens of thousands continue their protest for the sixth successive day in Wenceslas Square.

Presenter/John Tusa, Producers/Barney Rowntree and Robert Abel

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Sponsored by a well-known soap, the Lux Radio Theater brought the silver screen to the airwaves, with specially adapted versions of movies including It's A Wonderful Life and The Wizard Of Oz.

Professor Jeffrey Richards explores how cinema and radio united and produced an unlikely love child.

From its first production in 1935, The Legionnaire And The Lady, with Clark Gable and Marlene Dietrich, the Lux Radio Theater strove to have the same stars as the films. Over its 19-year history, it boasted the biggest names in Hollywood – Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Spencer Tracey and many more.

Sometimes the original players were not available so the Lux Radio Theater offered audiences a glimpse of an alternative universe, as listeners discovered what these films would have been like with different actors. In this programme, listeners can find out whether Hedy Lamarr and Alan Ladd have the same chemistry as Bogart and Bergman.

The Theater's host, Cecil B DeMille, offered "greetings from Hollywood", gave a short introduction to the film and told listeners about the stars. He would reappear 20 minutes later, in the interval, with an advertisement for Lux and its frothy lather, and would return at the end for an apparently informal, yet scripted chat with the actors, in which they would invariably reveal their preference for a well-known soap.

These productions were live with full orchestra and they also had to be about half an hour shorter than the original, so are a pacier version, retaining key dialogue. But being live presented its own problems, with stars sometimes falling ill the day before, or, on one occasion, turning up at the studio 15 minutes after transmission had begun!

Presenter/Professor Jeffrey Richards, Producer/Stephen Hughes

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

Colin Murray presents the points-for-punditry sports panel show in front of an audience at the Sporting Words Festival in Leeds.

Colin is judge and jury as a panel of special guests, including journalist Martin Kelner and former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan, fight it out over the week's big sporting stories.

Presenter/Colin Murray, Producer/Simon Crosse

BBC Radio 5 Live Publicity

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5 Live Sport

Saturday 14 November

12.00noon-7.00pm BBC RADIO 5 LIVE

Mark Pougatch brings the programme live from Twickenham ahead of today's Autumn International between England and Argentina.

The commentary starts at 2.30pm with Ian Robertson, Alastair Eykyn and England World Cup winner Matt Dawson, plus regular updates of Scotland versus Fiji at Murrayfield. There's also news from the Masters tennis in Paris with Jonathan Overend.

At 5pm there's commentary of the England friendly international against Brazil, live from Doha, with John Murray, Ian Dennis and Chris Waddle.

Presenter/Mark Pougatch, Producer/Adrian Williams

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5 Live Sport – International Football 2009-10

Saturday 14 November

8.00-10.00pm BBC RADIO 5 LIVE

Live commentary of the World Cup 2010 first-leg play-off comes from Croke Park, Dublin, as the Republic of Ireland take on France to secure a place in the finals in South Africa next summer.

Producer/Mark Williams

BBC Radio 5 Live Publicity

International Football

Saturday 14 November

2.50-5.00pm BBC RADIO 5 LIVE SPORTS EXTRA

Uninterrupted commentary of the international friendly between Wales and Scotland comes live from Cardiff City Stadium.

Producer/Jen McAllister

BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra Publicity

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Rugby League

Saturday 14 November

7.15-9.30pm BBC RADIO 5 LIVE SPORTS EXTRA

BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra brings uninterrupted commentary of the final of the Four Nations tournament live from Elland Road, Leeds.

Producer/Jen McAllister

BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra Publicity

All aboard the disco train as DJ Marc Hughes returns for the latest edition of his 6 Mix residency. Marc – a Ministry Of Sound resident who has recently played across Russia and China (and is George Lamb's sidekick in his spare time) – plays the best in old skool house from the last 30 years, from Todd Terry and Masters At Work to obscure gems from the Chicago underground.

There is also another 40-minute trip on the Disco Express, featuring a selection of uplifting nuggets from the late Seventies and early Eighties and, in the last half hour, Marc goes into the mix, playing a selection of upfront minimal techno tunes that are setting dance floors alight in club land.

Presenter/Marc Hughes, Producer/Rowan Collinson

BBC 6 Music Publicity

Vilem Rieger, ex-Chancellor of an unnamed state, is leaving office, in Vacláv Havel's play. But does leaving necessarily mean that he, his mistress and his extended family have to leave the state villa, which has been their home for years?

This is Havel's first play since taking political office in 1989 (he was the last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic) and has his usual hallmarks of hilarity, absurdity and profound observation. Leaving is part of a series of programmes on BBC World Service remembering 1989 – the year of Europe's revolution – and includes Havel's own musings on the art of writing and performance.

Leaving stars David Haig (Four Weddings And A Funeral), Hugh Bonneville (Notting Hill), Joanna Scanlon (The Thick Of It) and Simon Russell Beale as the voice of the author himself. The cast also includes David Hargreaves, Stephen Hogan, Carl Prekopp, Ann Beach, Philip Fox, Annabelle Dowler and Jill Cardo.

Leaving is translated by Paul Wilson and adapted for radio by Jeremy Front.

BBC World Service Publicity