COMEDY LOCATIONS
Radio 4, 11.30am
The bones of old comics have been disinterred so often it comes as a relief to find the archaeologists turning their attention to their habitat. Put less floridly, over the next two weeks Jayne Ashbourne will be visiting and reporting on the effects comedy has had on its locale — Holmfirth in Yorkshire, setting for Last of the Summer Wine, is probably the best known example. And there is the damage that being the setting for The Office had on Slough (more than Betjeman’s poem?).
STEEL MAGNOLIA: DOLLY PARTON AT 60
Radio 2, 8.30pm
Amazingly, Dolly Parton is turning 60 on Thursday — well, most of her is. The most recognisable country music singer in the world, “five foot tall; five-ten in the heels and hair,” as she once so memorably (well, I remember it) told Russell Harty, has been a star since the 1960s, and shows no signs of letting time stale her infinite variety. Nick Barraclough talks to the birthday girl, as well as various famous friends and fans — Kenny Rogers, Porter Wagoner, Alison Krauss — painting a portrait of a woman seemingly for ever young, for ever chaming, monumentally talented and, when she needs to be, utterly ruthless.