THIS SCEPTRED ISLE: EMPIRE
Radio 4, 3.45pm
When we left Juliet Stevenson last November it was 1783 and Britain’s Empire was recently minus America. Those gagging to find out how it all ended will be pleased by her return for the final 60 chapters of Christopher Lee’s masterwork, taking us up to India’s independence in 1947 and the end of the British Empire as we knew it, or, at any rate, as the Victorians did. The decline of slavery, the Race for Africa, the mushrooming of colonies — history just doesn’t get much more interesting than this.
IMAGINARY FRIENDS
Radio 4, 8.30pm
You would be hard pressed to come across a more inclusive programme in 2006. Unless we suffered from grinding poverty of imagination, we all had imaginary friends as children — mine was a guardian angel, but that is probably because of the Catholic thing. Here children talk about (and to, in some material that is, frankly, scary when it is not you doing it) the ones they have now; adults talk about the ones they had then; and parents talk about how they accommodate their offspring’s mythical best friend without giving it the best bits of dinner.