Programme Information

Dermot O'Leary has live sessions from Air and American electronic band Passion Pit, while style guru and TV presenter Gok Wan joins him in the studio and shares his favourite records.

For Air's sixth album, Love 2, Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin dispensed with producers and built their own studio, where they spent the best part of a year with drummer Joey Waronker. Some of the album's rockier tracks provide a fresh contrast to earlier, more minimalist recordings on which drums were barely evident.

Passion Pit formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2007 and released their first album, Manners, earlier this year. They recently embarked on a tour around America, Europe and Japan.

Presenter/Dermot O'Leary, Producer/Ben Walker

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

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Igor Stravinsky rehearsing with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the BBC's Maida Vale studios

BBC 6 Music presenter Cerys Matthews takes a historical tour through one of the music industry's most renowned buildings – the BBC's Maida Vale Studios.

Cerys meets the building's history makers past and present. As well as encountering soon-to-be-famous performers, she bumps into regular visitors to the studio, such as Johnny Marr, Rick Wakeman and Jools Holland, and also talks to the unsung heroes who help make dreams come true – the sound engineers.

Cerys explores the history of the building, from its transformation from a roller-skating rink to a studio, through the perils of the war years when the BBC played its own valuable part, through the introduction of "needletime", and on to the present day.

She visits Studio 1, the home of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and meets the people who've played a key role in the orchestra's history before finding out what really happened in the legendary Radiophonic Workshop.

Cerys then descends into the heart of the building to the lower corridor, where she discovers the old John Compton organ before finding the BBC Big Band in Studio 3. This room was instrumental to the success of BBC Radio 2 in the early days, as it was the home of all the live music that was created for the network's shows, such as Gloria Hunniford, Jimmy Young and Music While You Work.

Presenter/Cerys Matthews, Producer/Charlotte Wright

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

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This week, Bob Harris is joined by Tinariwen, a band of Touareg musicians who originate from the Sahara Desert region of northern Mali. Bob plays tracks from their latest album, Imidiwan: Companions.

The 30-year musical and social history of Tinariwen is a fascinating and inspiring tale. They began as a loose collection of displaced Touareg musicians and centred on Ibrahim Ag Alhabib who, although born in Mali, grew up in the refugee camps near the Malian border in Algeria and later around the southern Algerian city of Tamanrasset.

Coming together in the late Seventies with a shared passion for everything from traditional Touareg music and poetry to Western rock and pop artists such as Hendrix, Santana, Bob Marley and Led Zeppelin, the collective steadily built their reputation in and around the Sahara Desert. By the end of the Nineties, Tinariwen's reputation had begun to spread beyond their Saharan stronghold; in 1999 the band played a few gigs in France and in 2001 they played at the first Festival In The Desert in Mali, where they were heralded as the stars of the show.

Success came swiftly after this point; by the end of 2001 the band had performed at Womad and the South Bank in London and released their debut album, The Radio Tisdas Sessions. In the last eight years the band have played more than 700 concerts in Europe and released a further two albums, Amassakoul in 2004 and Aman Iman in 2007, picking up a number of awards along the way.

Presenter/Bob Harris, Producer/Mark Simpson

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

Two French women composers, Louise Heritte-Viardot and Mel Bonis, fought against the prejudice and pressures of their time to write their music. Both lived at the turn of the 20th century and, after their deaths, their music was either lost or ignored. Now their reputations are being revived.

Lowri Blake talks to those who are bringing the wealth of music by Heritte-Viardot and Bonis back into the public domain, and to Richard Langham-Smith, who writes about music and for whom this was a rewarding voyage of discovery.

Presenter/Lowri Blake, Producer/Richard Bannerman

BBC Radio 3 Publicity

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For more than 20 years, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group has been a leading light in the UK's contemporary music scene. One of the group's innovations is its commissioning scheme, Sound Investment. Since 1991, for a modest fee, the Group's audiences have been able to take a share in paying for a new work: up to 30 individuals can commission a composer. The opening concert of their 2009/10 season (from which tonight's Hear And Now has taken four works) features three collectively funded premières.

Diego Masson conducts Simon Holt's revised version (for chamber ensemble) of the Goya-inspired Capriccio spettrale and two further premières by Birmingham-based composers. Richard Causton's Chamber Symphony and Vic Hoyland's Hey Presto!... moon – flower – bat. Hoyland was the first composer to be commissioned by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in 1989, and his new piece quotes from the oldest music in the programme, Bruno Maderna's 1962 Oboe Concerto No. 1, played by Nicholas Daniel.

Presenter/Tom Service, Producer/David Papp

BBC Radio 3 Publicity

Open Country Ep 1/14

Saturday 31 October

6.00-6.30am BBC RADIO 4 (Schedule Amendment 21 October)

Queen guitarist Brian May

Queen's Brian May uncovers the story of an Oxfordshire village captured in time by a Victorian photographic pioneer.

When Brian discovered a set of old photographic prints in his loft he immediately recognised their importance. The Queen guitarist has been fascinated by 3-D images since collecting cereal packet picture cards as a boy. The photos Brian found were stereoscopic images of village life taken by photographic pioneer TR Williams.

A little detective work revealed all the images to be 3-D pictures of the tiny Oxfordshire village of Hinton Waldrist, taken in the 1850s.

For Open Country, Brian joins presenter Helen Mark for a time-travel tour of the village. He discovers how the people and wildlife of this community have changed since Williams recorded these evocative images of blacksmiths, spinners and farm workers.

Local wildlife experts introduce him to the new species that have arrived in the Thames; local farmers explain how they've changed the landscape; and villagers reflect on the lives of their ancestors.

Meanwhile, Brian and an expert on the history of 3-D images take and develop their own stereoscopic images of Hinton Waldrist today.

This is the first in a new series of BBC Radio 4’s countryside programme. Later in the series, presenters Helen Mark and Matt Baker will be visiting the site of Britain’s largest ever explosion – the Hanbury Crater in Staffordshire, they’ll be investigating the effects of open-cast mining in Lanarkshire and following a young vet’s first weeks on-call in rural Devon.

Presenter/Helen Mark, Producer/Alasdair Cross

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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Now Wash Your Hands tells the story of the original Izal medicated toilet paper.

Recorded in South Yorkshire, where the toilet paper was made, this programme hears from Izal's workers, including a champion toilet-roll roller; the woman who dealt with rejects; the apprentice who labelled 5,000 rolls a day; the marketing man who went on to become mayor; and the quality assurance manager who counted the number of sheets on random rolls, weighing, measuring and testing absorbency.

This toilet roll was distributed freely to authorities throughout the Empire to advertise the company's world-beating disinfectant, Izal, a compound that killed everything from measles to cholera. It was a pioneer in the decades between carbolic acid and the less-toxic germicides – and antibiotics – now taken for granted.

Demand for the toilet paper grew, resulting in a toilet-paper making factory in Chapeltown, and it boomed until the late Sixties. It was still found in public conveniences everywhere until the Eighties.

Presenter Sally Goldsmith, owner of a piece of Izal toilet paper, is a songwriter and has written some original songs to celebrate the manufacture and blossoming of this toilet roll; a remnant of an age of austerity, taking its place somewhere between torn-up newspaper and the multi-ply-aloe-vera rolls of today.

Presenter/Sally Goldsmith, Producer/Frances Byrnes

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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BBC Radio 4 continues to recreate 1989 in sound – drawing on the BBC and other news archive and music of the time. The daily programmes, presented by Sir John Tusa, re-trace the year's major political, cultural and social events as they happened.

In this week's stories, shadow energy secretary Tony Blair demands the scrapping of electricity privatisation plans; President Bush agrees to meet President Gorbachev on his boat in the Mediterranean for unofficial talks; President Ortega of Nicaragua breaks a 19-month ceasefire with US-backed Contra rebels; and a coroner overseeing the inquest into the death of Beverly Lewis demands better community care for the mentally ill.

In an unprecedented move, KGB officers take questions from the public on live TV; protests in East Germany force the resignation of the Mayor of Leipzig and five government hardliners and a backlash against East German refugees begins in West Germany; and Margaret Thatcher is judged to be the least popular Prime Minister since polling began.

This week also saw Sony Walkman celebrate its 10th birthday and supporters of women's ordination holding an overnight vigil outside Lambeth Palace.

Presenter/Sir John Tusa, Producer/Robert Abel

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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Ian McMillan presents a portrait of Ken Campbell and looks at his career in film and on stage and television.

Campbell was a writer, actor, director and comedian, known for his work in experimental theatre and once referred to as "unclassifiable". His adaptation of the science-fiction trilogy Illuminatus! lasted nine hours and he also staged the play cycle The Warp, which lasted 22 hours.

As well as his theatre career, Campbell worked extensively on television, both as an actor and a presenter for a series of science programmes on Channel 4, examining physics and cognitive science.

In this programme, Ian visits Campbell's Epping Forest home, complete with his copious library and a mural of Prince Philip meeting the tribe of Vanuatu – the South Pacific tribe whose language Campbell used for his version of Macbeth.

Richard Eyre and Jim Broadbent discuss his work in the theatre, including the production which opened the Cottesloe Theatre and the road show which performed in pubs across the country, and whose members included Sylvester McCoy and Bob Hoskins.

Ian remembers the day when Campbell involved guests of a radio programme in a discussion about the artistic merits of paintings made by parrot droppings.

Presenter/Ian McMillan, Producer/Robyn Read

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

Formula 1

Saturday 31 October

9.55-11.05am BBC RADIO 5 LIVE SPORTS EXTRA

12.55-2.05pm BBC RADIO 5 LIVE SPORTS EXTRA

BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra brings uninterrupted commentary of the third practice session of the final race of the Formula 1 season, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, live from the Yas Marina circuit.

This is followed, at 12.55pm, by uninterrupted commentary of the qualifying session.

Producer/Jason Swales

BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra Publicity

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Rugby League

Saturday 31 October

2.05-4.30pm BBC RADIO 5 LIVE SPORTS EXTRA

England face Australia in rugby league's Four Nations tournament, with live commentary on BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra from the DW Stadium in Wigan.

Producer/Jen McAllister

BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra Publicity

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Cycling

Saturday 31 October

7.00-10.20pm BBC RADIO 5 LIVE SPORTS EXTRA

Live commentary from the second day of the UCI Cycling Track World Cup comes from the Manchester Velodrome.

Producer/Jen McAllister

BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra Publicity

Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish bring their usual award-winning shenanigans to listeners on Saturday morning, including commands for Black Squadron (Adam and Joe's early rising fans), Text The Nation and Song Wars.

For more information, listeners can check out their blog at bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamandjoe.

Presenters/Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish, Producer/James Stirling

BBC 6 Music Publicity

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Craig Charles showcases highlights from a special night of music, recorded live at Maida Vale as part of the BBC's 75-year celebration of the studios. Music is provided by the show's own Fantasy Funk Band, made up of suggestions from the Funk And Soul audience, and includes James Taylor on Hammond, the Haggis Horns, Eddie Roberts from the New Mastersounds on guitar, Ernie Maconie on bass, Mike Bandoni on drums and John Turrell and Dionne Charles on vocals.

It's the funkiest way to celebrate Maida Vale's 75th birthday!

Presenter/Craig Charles, Producer/Hermeet Chadra

BBC 6 Music Publicity

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Pioneering DJ Derrick May returns to 6 Mix with three new and exclusive DJ sets, showcasing tunes from his musical past, present and future. Derrick – best known for his 1987 dance anthem Strings Of Life under the name Rhythm Is Rhythm – has been an iconic name on the techno scene for more than 20 years, DJing worldwide to a devoted fan base.

Hailing from Detroit, Michigan, May's work, alongside fellow DJs Juan Atkins and Inner City's Kevin Saunderson, has provided the catalyst for a number of producers worldwide. In his second 6 Mix of the year, Derrick plays classic house tunes which have inspired him, from Fingers Inc and Lil Louis to jazz from Herbie Hancock and upfront music from John Tejada. He also talks about his work as a DJ and where's he's heading musically.

There's also a new hi-tech soul mix and, in the second hour of the show, Derrick gets on the decks for an exclusive May Day club mix, featuring Liaisons Dangereuses,Patrick Cowley and hot tunes from his own Transmat label.

Presenter/Derrick May, Producer/Rowan Collinson

BBC 6 Music Publicity