THE OLD BILL
Radio 4, 3.45pm
Richard Foster packs an awful amount of information into these short (15-minute) programmes about the spending habits of our ancestors which, of course, tell us so much about our own. In this latest series an 18th-century painter and a 17th-century trader have their financial lives laid bare by their bills and receipts, while Foster also tots up the costs of a posh wedding, an orchestra and a top interior designer.
UNKNOWN WARRIORS
Radio 4, 8pm
“From the end of the Second World War until the late 1960s,” says Henry Bonsu, who presents this fascinating and disturbing history of racism in the Armed Forces, “the British army operated a quota system restricting the number of recruits from ethnic minorities.” Putting aside personal attitudes towards those who volunteer to kill people for a living, one is interested to discover how things have changed since then. Not much, it appears — the colour bar may have officially not existed for 40 years, but one black former soldier after another lines up to describe his experience of the sort of racial hatred normally encountered only at a Ku Klux Klan meeting.