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The Times & The Sunday Times
The Times & The Sunday Times
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Radio Choice

Chris Campling
The Times
Chris Campling
The Times

THE MATERIAL WORLD

Radio 4, 4.30pm

The kilogram is in trouble. You can’t rely on it, you see. Other units of measurement are defined by constants of nature, but the kilo actually exists, and it changes. “Le grand K” is a small cylinder made of platinum and rhodium, kept in a heavily guarded subterranean vault on the outskirts of Paris. If it gets slightly dirty, the kilo gets slightly heavier, which knocks measurements all over the world out of synch. I’m not making this up, you know, although the presenter Sue Nelson might be if she wasn’t so deadly serious about just what it is that science is doing to come up with a dependable kilo.

JANE GAZZO’S DREAM TICKET

BBC 6 Music, 10pm

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Once again, something to keep some of us up beyond our bedtime. Is it the Beat live at at Hammersmith Palais in 1982? No. Is it the featured album, See Through This and Leave by the excellent Cooper Temple Clause? Again no. It is the prospect of the shouty agit-poppers Chumbawumba working through the cover versions they recorded for John Peel’s show a dozen years ago: Knock Three Times, Y Viva España, The Birdie Song and Agadoo. The mind, she boggles.