BERTOLT BRECHT’S EAST BERLIN
Radio 4, 11.30am
On the 50th anniversary — plus a month, but then you can’t have everything — of the great dramatist’s death, David Edgar tells the story of what should have been Brecht’s greatest triumph — his return to Communist East Berlin, a hero of the proletariat. And yet his last few years in the bosom of the ideology he had embraced for so long was soured, ironically enough, by the state’s clamping down on the artistic freedoms Brecht (above) had come to expect in the West.
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JAMMIN’
Radio 2, 10pm
Yes, I know — it is that strange Rowland Rivron again with his extraordinarily shambolic comedy-music panel game that, like Marmite, divides the nation into those who really love it and those who can’t stand it. And I did intend to ignore the latest series of it, thus pleasing the anti majority. But the first two programmes were so bizarrely fine that my head will rest uneasy on my pillow if a wider public does not learn that this week Nick van Eede of the 1980s hitmakers Cutting Crew performs How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? in the style of Tom Waits.