THE SOUND OF LIFE: THE UNDERWATER CHORUS
Radio 4, 9pm
Half-way through Aubrey Manning’s brave attempt to capture in sound a part of the natural landscape you would have thought had been thoroughly trampled by television, and it is looking safe to say that Manning is the man. After a shaky start each subsequent programme has been an improvement on the last, to the point where Sound of Life is beginning to throw up a few of those watercooler moments that mark the transition from honest trier to real contender. Tonight, for example, the good professor returns under water — always a rich source of material — to capture the vocabularies of whales, dolphins, seals and even fish. Can a fish really speak? Well, not really, but some of them can hum, apparently. It’s a sex thing.
MY AIM IS TRUE: THE ELVIS COSTELLO STORY
BBC 6 Music, 9.30pm
On Wednesday Elvis Costello, quite possibly the best British pop lyricist of them all (you try to come up with anyone more qualified, except maybe Ray Davies), turns 50. What better time for 6 Music to re-run Phill Jupitus’s excellent four-part history of the great man, delving way back into his beginnings as the son of the man who sang on the R. White’s lemonade advert, and bringing him up to date as a man constantly on the lookout for new musical horizons to explore.