Programme Information

Legendary guitarist Brian May, from rock band Queen, joins Elaine Paige in the studio this week. Brian shares his favourite Essential Musicals, which include We Will Rock You, which is based on the music of Queen.

There are also break-a-leg messages and the Big One from Malcolm Prince which, this week, is taken from Sunset Boulevard.

Presenter/Elaine Paige, Producer/Malcolm Prince

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

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The Christian Church celebrates Education Sunday today which is a national day of prayer and thanksgiving for all involved in the world of education.

Brian D'Arcy explores this year's theme, Called To Serve, with hymns and prayers.

Presenter/Brian D'Arcy, Producer/Janet McLarty

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

Scottish actress Siobhan Redmond

Siobhan Redmond and Paul Higgins lead a cast of top Scottish actors in this new production of Chekhov's classic drama, The Seagull.

In part a tragic play about eternally unhappy people, Chekhov has always surprised his audiences by viewing The Seagull as a comedy, poking fun at human folly. All the characters are dissatisfied with their lives. Some desire love, some yearn for success, some crave artistic genius, but no one ever seems to attain happiness.

When famous actress Irina Arkadina arrives to spend the summer on her brother Sorin's country estate, tempers inevitably fray.

Irina Arkadina is played by Siobhan Redmond.

The Seagull is adapted for radio by Stuart Paterson from the first-ever English translation by George Calderon.

Presenter/Dominic Hill, Producer/Turan Ali

BBC Radio 3 Publicity

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Tom De Waal examines the history of Pontic Greek culture. The Black Sea region of Turkey was once the ancient kingdom of the Pontus and its Christian orthodox inhabitants subsequently survived and thrived throughout Byzantine and Ottoman times. However, for centuries this culture, centred on the great trading port of Trebizond, on the caravan route to Persia, was living on borrowed time.

The 1923 exchange of populations between modern Greece and Turkey, resulting from the Lausanne Treaty, was the endgame that gave rise to the Pontic nationality splitting among multiple citizenships. The shepherds in the high mountains behind the city of Trebizond, who for more than a thousand years had driven their flocks up onto the high plateau in summer and back to the narrow coastal plain in winter, sometimes adopting a Christian persona, sometimes a Muslim one, disappeared, and the economy has never really recovered.

Worse than this for some, the architectural jewel that was Trabzon (as it is now called) has become an almost Soviet-like conglomeration of tower blocks. The final insult came five years ago with the corrupt and much-opposed construction of a coastal motorway which has chopped this once great maritime city off from the Black Sea.

Tom de Waal traces some of what has been lost to the Soumela Monastery, at which on 15 August every year people of Pontic descent from across the globe come to remember the feast of the Virgin. Here there is a collision of Russian, Turkish and Greek interests, which provides a lesson in modern regional politics.

But connecting all of these disparate people is music – the Greek lyre and the Turkish kemence, a small violin played like a cello. They play the same, they dance the same. Culturally connected and politically divided this is a story of people who are really cousins, or even brothers, but cannot quite bring themselves to admit it.

Presenter/Tom De Waal, Producer/Neil Trevithick

BBC Radio 3 Publicity

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Michael Maloney and Lesley Sharp read poems and texts surveying all aspects of the human face, from writers including Christina Rossetti, Ovid, George Barlow and extracts from Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray, and with music by Gershwin, Purcell and George Michael.

The face of the mother is the first thing on which the human baby focuses at birth. From then on, faces take on a huge significance throughout life. Humans communicate all their emotions through their faces, eyes and with words spoken through lips.

This week's Words And Music surveys all aspects of the face, including beauty, youth, ugliness, love and fear.

Readers/Michael Maloney and Lesley Sharp, Producer/Helen Garrison

BBC Radio 3 Publicity

Living World Ep 1/5

Sunday 31 January

6.35-7.00am BBC RADIO 4

Described as "jet-propelled mouths", pike have a well-deserved reputation as the river's most fearsome predator. In the first of a new series of Living World, Lionel Kelleway goes fishing for pike on the banks of the River Frome in Dorset.

He is joined by keen fisherman and retired freshwater biologist Mike Ladle, who will never forget the first time he landed a pike as a child.

He was trying to catch eels and hauled up a pike on his line instead. When he tried to release the hook from inside the pike's mouth, he soon found out why fishermen treat pike with such respect – their mouths are lined with rows of backwardly pointing teeth. They even have teeth on their tongue, a tongue that is green. So once a pike has trapped its prey in its mouth – there's no escape from those rows of thorn-like teeth.

Pike catch their prey by hiding undercover at the edge of the bank and then curling their tail round, which acts like a spring, to thrust them forwards at their prey with terrific speed. Pike are cannibalistic fish and will feed on their relatives and their own young.

Years of catching, tagging, releasing and studying pike have given Mike a fascinating knowledge of how these formidable creatures behave. But there still remain a few mysteries about the pike, as he reveals in the programme.

Presenter/Lionel Kelleway, Producer/Sarah Blunt

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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Desert Island Discs host Kirsty Young

This week's castaway is Mary Beard, Professor of classics at Cambridge University.

Born in Shropshire in 1955, the daughter of an architect and a headmistress, Mary would attend archaeological excavations in summer holidays. Initially, she joined the digs to earn money but began to find the study of antiquity interesting.

Attending a single-sex college, she discovered that some men at Cambridge University were dismissive towards women's academic potential, and this strengthened her resolve to succeed.

Mary lectured in classics at King's College, London, and returned to Cambridge in 1984 as fellow of Newnham College, the only female lecturer in the classics faculty.

Mary tells Kirsty Young about her life, her favourite music and describes how she would cope on BBC Radio 4's mythical island.

Presenter/Kirsty Young, Producer/Leanne Buckle

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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In the second part of John le Carré's The Honourable Schoolboy, agent George Smiley is in Hong Kong.

The Honourable Schoolboy is the sixth in BBC Radio 4's series of dramatisations of John le Carré's work, featuring his character, George Smiley. A stellar cast includes Hugh Bonneville, Maggie Steed, Daisy Haggard and, of course, Simon Russell Beale as Smiley.

Aided by the few people he can really trust, Smiley unearths a "gold seam" – a record of large amounts of money passing from Moscow to an anonymous bank account in British-controlled Hong Kong.

The operation in Hong Kong becomes increasingly dangerous when the government and American Intelligence begin to take notice.

Hugh Bonneville plays Jerry Westerby, Maggie Steed is Connie Sachs and Daisy Haggard is Liese Worth.

Producer/Marc Beeby

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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Poetry Please Ep 1/8

Sunday 31 January

4.30-5.00pm BBC RADIO 4

Roger McGough returns with a new year of poetry requested by listeners.

The series begins with a burst of creative energy from Stevie Smith's galloping cat and Les Murray's poem defining the quintessentially Australian quality of "sprawl". Tony Harrison reflects on the fires of creation and destruction, and there's a recollection of high summer from Sylvia Plath. The readers include Tanya Moodie, John Telfer and David Henry.

Other programmes in the series include: Ted Hughes's skin-shivering poem, Horses; a poem by polymath designer William Morris about the beginning of his passion for Iceland; and reflections on a lucky life and death from Raymond Carver. There is also a tender poem about fatherhood and language from 2008 Forward Prize-winning poet Mick Imlah.

The tone for the Valentine's Day programme is set by Jenny Joseph, the author of Warning. Joseph's new collection is called Nothing Like Love, and explores passionate love and rejection. The programme includes readings by Joseph.

Presenter/Roger McGough, Producer/Mary Ward-Lowery

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

5 Live Sport

Sunday 31 January

12.00noon-6.00pm BBC RADIO 5 LIVE

Colin Murray presents the latest sports news and an afternoon of live action. At 1.30pm, there is commentary of Manchester City versus Portsmouth in the Premier League, live, from Fratton Park, plus tennis updates from the men's final at the Australian Open in Melbourne.

At 4pm, there is more live Premier League commentary as Arsenal play Manchester United at the Emirates Stadium.

Presenter/Colin Murray, Producer/Ed King

BBC Radio 5 Live Publicity

Tennis

Sunday 31 January

8.30am-2.00pm BBC RADIO 5 LIVE SPORTS EXTRA

• www.bbc.co.uk/tennis

Listeners can enjoy live, uninterrupted commentary on the men's singles final at the Australian Open, live, from Melbourne.

Producer/Jen McAllister

BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra Publicity

The Music Week speaks to superband-of-the-moment Them Crooked Vultures.

Dave Grohl of Nirvana and Foo Fighters, Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones, and Queen Of The Stone Age's Josh Homme grant Matt Everitt and Julie Cullen an audience backstage at their recent Hammersmith Apollo gig. They talk through their shared musical past and look to the future and the possibility of a second album.

Presenters/Julie Cullen and Matt Everitt, Producer/Tom Green

BBC 6 Music Publicity

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Fun Lovin' Criminal Huey Morgan meets a hero to those who've succumbed to the complex charms of cult US crime drama series The Wire – Idris Elba, who played drug baron Stringer Bell.

Idris is also known as Driis to the hip-hop world, performing, producing and djing since the early Nineties. His production credits can be found on the American Gangster soundtrack with Jay-Z and Angie Stone. This February, Driis releases a new EP, featuring a more mellow "hip-hop soul" vibe, called High Class Problems Vol 1, featuring single Private Garden. Huey talks to Driis about his new material, some of the hip-hop luminaries he's worked with, the legacy of Stringer Bell and how he's overcoming the actor/musician "curse".

Presenter/Huey Morgan, Producer/Becky Maxted

BBC 6 Music Publicity