Programme Information

Jonathan Ross and Andy Davies are joined by actor Anthony Head, the star of BBC One drama Merlin, and by comedian Ricky Gervais. There is also live music from British synthpop duo La Roux, who last week made headlines with their musical collaboration with electro artists Heaven 17 for BBC 6 Music.

Presenter/Jonathan Ross, Producer/Fiona Day

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

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Dermot O'Leary has live sessions from Mika and OK Go.

Brit award-winner Mika has enjoyed great success since topping the BBC's Sound Of 2007 poll. His debut single, Grace Kelly, sold three million copies worldwide and, on New Year's Eve 2009, he presented his own BBC Radio 2 show. February sees the release of his next single, Blame It On The Girls.

US rock band OK Go secured their place in popular culture when their creative use of treadmills in the Here It Goes Again video was parodied by The Simpsons. They've since played in the chambers of the United States Senate and helped raise money to rebuild the music community of New Orleans. They've just released their third studio album, Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky.

Presenter/Dermot O'Leary, Producer/Ben Walker

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

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Deacon Blue singer-songwriter Ricky Ross

Deacon Blue singer-songwriter Ricky Ross presents highlights of Celtic Connections 2010 from Glasgow – Scotland's premier winter music festival with more than 1,500 folk, roots, world, Americana and traditional music artists playing.

Ricky talks to the featured artists from this year's event and re-lives past musical highlights from Bobby McFerrin, Natalie Merchant, The Low Anthem, Del Castillo, Capercaillie and Beth Nielsen Chapman And Charlie Dore.

Presenter/Ricky Ross, Producer/Richard Murdoch

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

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Marcus Bonfanti plays live for Bob Harris after midnight and talks about his second album, What Good Am I To You, which features a range of influences from Tony Joe White to Led Zeppelin.

Marcus, 27, was born and raised in London. A self-taught guitarist, he has studied at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA) and has been involved in top-level session work.

Jimmy Page became a lasting inspiration through Bonfanti's time at Lipa. He opted not to complete his three years there but, with the resourcefulness of a jobbing musician, he was asked back to play in the band at the graduation party he hadn't qualified for. A 2008 debut album, Hard Times, followed.

Presenter/Bob Harris, Producer/Mark Simpson

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

Miranda Hinkley explores the extraordinary story of Mikis Theodorakis, one of Greece's most celebrated composers. Best known for his music to 1974 film Zorba The Greek, Theodorakis will be 85 this year.

Part of the resistance during the Second World War, imprisoned during the Greek Civil War, and exiled during the military dictatorship, his story mirrors that of modern Greece. These experiences are reflected in his music. Urgent, challenging and diverse, it includes countless popular songs now embedded in the national psyche, as well as bold and original chamber music, operas and symphonies.

Miranda meets the composer to look back at a 60-year career and, with the help of singers Maria Farantouri and Marios Frangoulis, and violinist Georgos Demertzis, considers his musical legacy.

Presenter and Producer/Miranda Hinkley

BBC Radio 3 Publicity

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Opera On 3 – Stiffelio

Saturday 30 January

6.00-9.30pm BBC RADIO 3

José Cura as Stiffelio and Sondra Radvanovsky as Lina in Verdi's Stiffelio

Live from the Metropolitan Opera New York, Plácido Domingo conducts Verdi's strikingly modern take on a marriage in crisis, Stiffelio, with José Cura in the title role.

Stiffelio had a troubled history. The predominantly Catholic Italy of the mid-19th century was not ready for a story of adultery in the home of a protestant minister and the opera was severely censored at the time of its première in 1850. Forced to extensively revise his opera, Verdi then lost interest in it and did his best to destroy all copies of the original manuscript. It wasn't until 1960 that a complete score of Stiffelio was discovered and, in 1993, it entered the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera with tenor Domingo in the title role.

Domingo now takes up the conductor's baton whilst Argentinian tenor José Cura sings the role of Stiffelio, the troubled clergyman who is torn between his ideals and the urge for revenge. American soprano Sondra Radvanovsky performs the role of his wife, Lina.

Presented by Margaret Juntwait with guest commentator Ira Siff, the programme includes backstage interviews with members of the cast and the Met Quiz during the intervals.

Presenter/Margaret Juntwait, Producer/Anthony Sellors

BBC Radio 3 Publicity

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One of the most enigmatic stage directions in all drama appears in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard: "A distant sound is heard. It appears to come from the sky and is the sound of a breaking string. It dies away sadly."

This week's Between The Ears focuses on the many attempts to produce this sound, using items ranging from musical saws to gun-shots.

Guests include Paul Arditti, who mixed industrial, musical and bird sounds for the production by Sam Mendes, and musician Leafcutter John, who accepts BBC Radio 3's own Chekhov Challenge, recording his experiments to find a resonant breaking-string sound for the 21st century.

Reader/Emerald O'Hanrahan, Producer/John Goudie

BBC Radio 3 Publicity

Every Prime Minister feels the need to travel. Usually during the Parliamentary recess, they travel to foreign countries – to meet other great leaders, to cheer up the troops, to show they're abreast of global affairs and to impress the voters back home. With them goes a motley crew of minders, civil servants, diplomats and journalists.

Julia Langdon, one-time political editor of the Daily Mirror and Sunday Telegraph, has travelled with four Prime Ministers and has been round the world many times with Margaret Thatcher. Julia tells the programme how she has watched elderly despots dance attendance upon Mrs T, and has watched Mrs T dance herself. She has trailed the former PM around building sites in the Middle East, a sewer works in Cairo, a mine in Namibia and a mass transit system in Singapore. She has watched as Thatcher took tea in a trench with two African Presidents in a war zone, and she was on the ministerial plane when Frelimo guerrillas in Mozambique tried to bring it down with a ground-to-air missile. Once, Julia was mistaken for the Prime Minister herself by the military top brass in Moscow.

It's a gruelling rather than glamorous experience, constantly crossing time zones, constantly being jet lagged and rarely getting the chance to get a good night's sleep or even do your washing. But it's exciting, it serves democracy and, for a journalist, it's a great source of stories.

In this programme, Julia talks to some of the others who've gone travelling with the Prime Minister, including Sir Bernard Ingham, Sir Christopher Meyer, Trevor Kavanagh and Chris Moncrieff, about what went right, what went wrong and what was fun.

Presenter/Julia Langdon, Producer/Chris Bond

BBC News Publicity

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Flexible Friend Or Foe explores how a sliver of plastic took over the world.

The credit card was launched by Barclays in the UK in 1966. The Barclaycard was marketed at first as a "shopping card", not as a credit card, in order to thwart the British public's resistance to incurring debt.

Barclaycard's first on-screen advertisement, called Travelling Light, was targeted at women and featured the famous Barclaycard Bikini Girl who, oblivious to the shocked looks of passers-by, is seen making her way down a busy shopping street buying clothes and records, wearing nothing but a lilac-coloured bikini and carrying her Barclaycard in the bikini bottom. The advert finished with the line: "Barclaycard: all a girl needs when she goes shopping."

That first card is now accompanied by some 1,700 other credit cards in Britain alone. Britain has the unenviable record as the world's most intensive credit-card country with 67 million cards for 59 million people.

Presenter/Max Flint, Producer/Terry Lewis

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

5 Live Sport

Saturday 30 January

12.00noon-7.20pm BBC RADIO 5 LIVE

Mark Pougatch presents an afternoon of live sport, with updates from the East Midlands derby between Derby County and Nottingham Forest in the Championship from 1pm. There are also regular tennis updates from the men's semi-final and women's final at the Australian Open in Melbourne and racing from Cheltenham.

There's coverage of the afternoon's 3pm football matches including Birmingham City versus Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool versus Bolton Wanderers in the Premier League, plus Hamilton versus Celtic and Rangers versus Falkirk in the Scottish Premier League. There are also updates from rugby union's Anglo-Welsh Cup third-round ties, rugby league Super League action and International athletics from Glasgow.

At 5.30pm, there's Premier League commentary of Burnley versus Chelsea, live from Turf Moor.

Presenter/Mark Pougatch, Producer/Mark Williams

BBC Radio 5 Live Publicity

Tennis

Saturday 30 January

8.30-11.30am BBC RADIO 5 LIVE SPORTS EXTRA

• www.bbc.co.uk/tennis

Live and uninterrupted commentary on the women's singles final at the Australian Open comes from Melbourne.

Producer/Jen McAllister

BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra Publicity

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Football

Saturday 30 January

2.55-7.15pm BBC RADIO 5 LIVE SPORTS EXTRA

• www.bbc.co.uk/football

Uninterrupted live commentary on two of the day's Championship matches includes Leicester City versus Newcastle United from the Walkers Stadium at 5.20pm.

Producer/Jen McAllister

BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra Publicity

BBC 6 Music presenter Richard Bacon

Richard Bacon brings two hours of anecdotal, observational conversation to BBC 6 Music listeners.

Alongside best friend and right-hand-man Marc Haynes, Richard initiates his trademark audience-participation and listener-led topical chat. Mundane texts, records of achievement and "Twittercisms" are punctuated with music and sprinkled with a few picks from Richard's own collection.

Presenter/Richard Bacon, Producer/Dan Cocker

BBC 6 Music Publicity

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Electro expert and Wall Of Sound record label boss Mark Jones presents a special show celebrating BBC 6 Music's unique collaboration with Gary Numan and Little Boots, currently available to BBC digital viewers under the Red button.

The show features an in-depth interview between Gary and Mark, first broadcast in November 2009, discussing Numan's work as a synth pioneer and the re-issue of his landmark 1979 album, The Pleasure Principle, featuring massive hit single Cars. Gary also picks music which influenced and inspired him, ranging from David Bowie to T Rex and Nine Inch Nails.

Alongside Gary's interview, Mark delves into the BBC archive to play Little Boots's 6 Mix from August 2008. Little Boots – Blackpool's Victoria Hesketh – went on to be voted No. 1 in the BBC's Sound Of 2009 and has had hit singles with New In Town and Remedy. This was the first-ever mix she did for BBC Radio and features tunes from The Black Ghosts and Hercules And Love Affair.

Presenter/Mark Jones, Producer/Rowan Collinson

BBC 6 Music Publicity