SATURDAY 9
PROMS IN THE PARK
Radio 2, 7.30pm
Terry Wogan bumbles beamingly on stage in Hyde Park to introduce the soprano Angela Gheorghiu, her hubby, the tenor Roberto Alagna, the latest Italian opera-pop crossover Vittorio Grigolo and the trumpeter Alison Balsom, before everything shifts indoors for The Last Night of the Proms (on Radio 3 from 7.30pm).
SUNDAY 10
SUNDAY FEATURE
Radio 3, 9.30pm
In the second Meetings of Minds, Frances Stonor Saunders invites us to cast our minds back to November 1095. It was then, in the French town of Clermont, that Pope Urban II gave what might best be termed the dregs of Europe the green light to march off to the Holy Land and “rescue” it from the Turks in the First Crusade.
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MONDAY 11
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Radio 4, 9.45am/12.30am
David Profumo’s Bringing the House Down is a brilliantly ironic title, since it refers not only to the lies told in Parliament by his father, John, about his affair with Christine Keeler in the early 1960s, but also to the home life that the scandal turned from safe to frightening for the boy David was at the time. Robert Glenister is the reader.
TUESDAY 12
THE CHOICE
Radio 4, 9am/9.30pm
Michael Buerk returns with six more programmes hearing from people who had to make a big, sometimes world- changing, choice. And the first in the series is a winner: Sherron Watkins, the “whistleblower” who first noticed accounting irregularities at Enron, talks us through the whole multibillion-dollar collapse-of-the-century (so far).
WEDNDESDAY 13
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ICONOCLASTS
Radio 4, 8pm
“Religion has created the war; we must help it to create the peace.”
Rabbi Michael Melchior said that. He is a director of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity and a member of the Israeli Knesset and, not to put too fine a point on it, a dove in a parliament full of hawks. Strange to think that preaching peace has become iconoclastic, is it not?
THURSDAY 14
QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS
Radio 4, 3pm
What happened to the Government departments MI1 to MI4? Who was the original Jack the Lad? For ten years listeners have been popping the questions (although why they bother when The Times offers an excellent Q&A service, I do not know), and for ten years Stewart Henderson has rounded up people who know the answers.
FRIDAY 15
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THE FRIDAY PLAY
Radio 4, 9pm
Well done, Peter G. Morgan, for coming up with a play that uses Treasury documents to tell the story of Black Wednesday — when Britain was thrown out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism and the economy went for a loop — and also manages to cast Daniela Nardini as a sexy TV talking head with a tangled personal life.