PEACE, LOVE AND SOUL
Radio 2, 9pm
Top of the Pops may be no more, but there is still a place for a weekly chart-based pop TV programme featuring in-studio acts performing to an audience as well as video footage. In America there is, anyway. Here, Trevor Nelson tells the story of Soul Train, which has been informing American youth of what to listen to — and, even more importantly, how to dress and what to do with their hair — since the heyday of the Jackson 5, Al Green and the O’Jays.
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THE CLONARD PRIEST
Radio 4, 11am
Olivia O’Leary, one of the most simpatico interviewers in radio — just imagine what she could do with Desert Island Discs — brings us an even more riveting half-hour than usual. For 35 years a Catholic priest named Alec Reid acted as an intermediary between the IRA and the British and Irish governments as they inched towards, and frequently took huge strides away from, an end to the Troubles. Only now, with the IRA having decommissioned its weapons, does he feel he can talk about his experiences, the most hauntingly public of which was his administering the last rites to two British Army corporals murdered by a mob in 1988 after they had blundered into an IRA funeral cortège.