Programme Information

Dubstep's super-group Magnetic Man spend an hour talking to BBC Radio 1's Rob Da Bank about the 26 tracks that made them the triple-headed bassline behemoths that they are.

Previous Radio 1 Stories have included Story of Dubstep, The A-Z Of Enter Shikari, Empire State Of Mind and The Story Of Annie Nightingale.

Presenter/Rob Da Bank, Producers/Louise Kattherhorn and Alice Lloyd for the BBC

BBC Radio 1 Publicity

Vanessa Feltz

Monday 17 January

5.00-6.30am BBC RADIO 2

Vanessa Feltz joins BBC Radio 2 to present the Early Breakfast Show

This morning, Vanessa Feltz joins the BBC Radio 2 family as the presenter of the Early Breakfast Show.

Rising while many people are still fast asleep, Vanessa aims to coax the early risers out of their slumber and entertain those who haven't yet gone to bed. In a show bursting with music and chat she takes listeners through a first look at the day's news.

Vanessa says: "I'm overjoyed to be joining the UK's most listened-to network as I'm a huge fan of Radio 2 – home of many of the country's most beloved presenters. I'm utterly thrilled to be handing over to Chris Evans every morning – it's my idea of the perfect start to the day."

Presenter/Vanessa Feltz, Producer/Mark Hagen for the BBC

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

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It's Monday and Ken Bruce is back with Tracks Of My Years with Cyndi Lauper, who shot to fame in the mid Eighties with the hit Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.

There is also a brand new Record and Album Of The Week and the Love Song, plus travel updates throughout the show.

Presenter/Ken Bruce, Producer/Gary Bones for the BBC

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

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The Thrill Of It All Ep 1/2

Monday 17 January

10.00-11.00pm BBC RADIO 2

Roxy Music front-man Bryan Ferry

Jarvis Cocker branches out from his home network of digital radio station BBC 6 Music, where he hosts a Sunday afternoon show, to profile one of the most influential bands of the Seventies, Roxy Music, as they reform for an anniversary tour. The Thrill Of It All features interviews with key band members, showcases the songs and reflects on the Roxy legacy.

Evolving from the late Sixties art-rock movement, Roxy Music epitomised fashion, glamour and innovative music. Through the Seventies and Eighties, the band released a string of ground-breaking albums, culminating with the 1982 classic Avalon.

Programme one begins with Roxy Music emerging in 1972, making an instant visual and musical impact. The programme finds out the story behind the band's first UK No. 1 album, the creative tension between Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno and the subsequent departure of Eno, and the announcement that the band was breaking up in the summer of 1976.

The show explores the creative highpoints in the group's second album, For Your Pleasure, where fun songs such as Do The Strand and Editions Of You were complemented with tracks that oozed a sense of menace, including The Bogus Man and In Every Dream Home A Heartache.

Jarvis discusses the ground-breaking album covers which were deemed a highlight of each Roxy release, overseen by Ferry's artistic eye. Such sleeves, though, included the controversial 1974 album, Country Life, which featured two scantily clad young models and was deemed by some countries to be too controversial and risqué to sell. In America, for example, the cover was altered, with some states removing the girls completely.

The programme also explores the band's best-known songs, from Love Is The Drug to Both Ends Burning and Street Life, with revealing comments from Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera and Paul Thompson. There are also archive interviews with Brian Eno, and Chris Thomas, one of the band's key producers, also features.

Next week, programme two picks up the trail in the punk era, as the band regroups in 1978.

Presenter/Jarvis Cocker, Producer/John Sugar for Sugar Productions

BBC Radio 2 Publicity

In the late Twenties, at the very height of his powers, Jean Sibelius abruptly and enigmatically put down his pen. For the three decades before his death in 1957 at the age of 91 he was to produce virtually no new work – living out the rest of his life shrouded in silent mystery in the depths of the forests north of Helsinki.

Or did he? In this week's Composer Of The Week, Donald MacLeod explores and explodes the mythology cloaking the last decades of Sibelius's life, a period not quite as "silent" as legend might have us believe.

Today's episode outlines the background behind Sibelius's last, and perhaps greatest, major orchestral work, his extraordinary, terrifying tone poem Tapiola. It also features an unexpected pair of solemn and reverent church antiphons, which are not at all what might be expected from this master of orchestral colour.

Presenter/Donald Macleod, Producer/Steven Rajam

BBC Radio 3 Publicity

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Baritone Henk Neven, a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, and pianist Hans Eijsackers make their Wigmore Hall debut with a programme of songs about love.

In his intimate song cycle To The Distant Beloved, Beethoven describes the longing for love, while Fauré tells of a love affair taking place over one day. The recital ends with a selection from Schubert's Schwanengesang.

Presenter/Louise Fryer, Producer/Ellie Mant

BBC Radio 3 Publicity

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This series of five essays on Montaigne accompanies Living With Princes, a BBC Radio 3 drama about the French essayist written by Stephen Wakelam, with Roger Allam as Montaigne, to be broadcast on Sunday 23 January.

Tonight's essayist is writer and broadcaster Alain de Botton. The series continues with philosopher and historian Theodore Zeldin, who considers to what extent Montaigne's philosophy on life holds true today; writer and Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, who explores the relationship between Montaigne and the Bard; Sarah Bakewell, writer and biographer of Montaigne, on Montaigne's cat, scepticism and animal souls; and philosopher AC Grayling.

Presenter/Alain de Botton, Producer/Mohini Patel

BBC Radio 3 Publicity

BBC RADIO 4 FILM SEASON
Brief Encounters Ep 1/15

Monday 17 January

Throughout the week BBC RADIO 4

A series of three-minute features will be scattered across the schedule over the two weeks of BBC Radio 4's Film Season. These mini-features transport listeners to cinemas across the world to hear from the owners, the audiences and those whose lives revolve around cinema.

One of the many cinematic experiences in this series is from Kabul. In the time of the Taliban, Afghani cinemas were closed and watching film was strictly forbidden, on pain of prison.

Today the cinemas are alive again as men – and it is still the men – who are jobless look to while away a few hours by gathering to watch action movies and Bollywood temptresses, munching on biscuits and roaring in disapproval at the "bad guys".

Extremists target the cinemas on a regular basis, but keen cinemagoers still return. A young actor, who grew up not even knowing what a cinema was, talks about his discovered love of the silver screen.

The mini-features reveal that each cinema has its own individuality and tradition, whether it's what people eat, how long they stay in their seats, the arguments that break out during screenings, or the buildings in which the films are shown.

Other stories in these series of clips include the Thai director who recalls watching Kung Fu movies during funerals in countryside temples; a cinema in Beirut where refugees watched classic movies as bombs fell outside; a Moroccan woman who had her first kiss in a cinema in Tangiers; and mobile phones being sold in the foyer of cinemas in the post-Soviet-era Republic of Georgia.

These clips, which run from 17 January, are 15 personal, illuminating stories giving a flavour of cinema around the world, and an idea of what it's like to be in the audience somewhere very different from here in the UK. There is also a 60-minute highlights programme, Brief Encounters – A World View Of Cinema, at the end of January, which, as well as an omnibus selection of the clips, also features film-makers and film experts guiding listeners to the global consumption of cinema.

Producer/Sara Jane Hall for the BBC

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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Woman's Hour Drama – The Year They Invented Sex Ep 1/5

Monday 17 to Friday 21 January

10.45-11.00am BBC RADIO 4

Caroline and David Stafford's drama focuses on three very different women who find their lives transformed by taking part in the trials of the contraceptive pill.

It is 1960 in Birmingham and Lella Florence is looking for women to help with trials of the contraceptive pill. Married women of a certain age and weight bracket are required.

Three very different women decide to take part. Ditsy June is fed up being under the influence of her overbearing in-laws and would rather save up for a new bathroom than for another baby. Glamorous Jeanette wants to avoid another agonising labour and to keep her wealthy husband happy. And Isobel has her own secret reasons for signing up...

None of the three women could guess the ways their lives will be changed by taking part in the trial and meeting each other.

Producer/Lucy Collingwood for the BBC

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

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BBC RADIO 4 FILM SEASON
Life At 24 Frames A Second Ep 1/10

Monday 17 to Friday 21 January

3.45-4.00pm BBC RADIO 4

David Thompson presents a 10-part series in which he takes a personal journey exploring how cinema has changed people, as part of BBC Radio 4's Film Season.

In the first programme, In The Dark, he looks at how it is all too easy for people to forget what a shock the moving image was when it first entered the world. He also explores why the dark is so important when it comes to watching moving images.

The second programme, Fear And Desire, looks at film's ability to take a person on a journey into their darkest dreams and explore their strongest desires.

Wednesday's programme, Wired For Sound, explores the death of a dream of a universal language of film as Al Jolson sang for his "mammy" in The Jazz Singer (1927).

In Friday's episode, You Must Remember This, David examines the concept that every movie is about time passing away and memory trying to say it was a story.

Producer/Mark Burman for the BBC

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

Mark Chapman presents football banter and debate, plus the day's sport news in The Monday Night Club.

From 9pm Mark Clemmit rounds up the weekend's Football League action.

In Football Express at 9.30pm, Mark Chapman and Dave Vitty bring listeners bang up to date with all football's burning issues in just 30 minutes.

At 10pm there's more on one of the day's top sports stories.

Presenters/Mark Chapman and Mark Clemmit, Producer/Mike Carr

BBC Radio 5 Live Publicity

Tennis

Monday 17 January

8.00am-1.30pm BBC RADIO 5 LIVE SPORTS EXTRA

Uninterrupted commentary comes from the night session at the Australian Open tennis in Melbourne.

Producer/Jen McAllister

BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra Publicity

Marc Riley's live band is Stephen Fretwell's new venture, north-south divide hybrid Howls.

Stephen is a regular contributor to the show's live session guest slot and has released two solo albums. Tonight he is joined by fellow founding member of Howls, Dan Carey.

Before Carey and Fretwell were first introduced by a mutual friend, a musical connection appeared unlikely. Carey, a producer, writer and remixer, had turned his talents to projects by artists as successful and diverse as Franz Ferdinand, Lily Allen, Kylie Minogue and Roisin Murphy.

Completing the band's four-piece line up are Fretwell's old friend Jay Sikora, a one-time part of Badly Drawn Boy's live band, and Oli Bayston, previously front-man of Manchester band Keith.

Presenter/Marc Riley, Producer/Michelle Choudhry

BBC 6 Music Publicity

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Gideon Coe plays concert archive from Gang Of Four and Lemon Jelly, plus featured sessions from the vaults including Richard Thompson, Soft Machine, Trixie's Big Red Motorbike and The Maladies Of Bellafontaine.

Presenter/Gideon Coe, Producer/Mark Sheldon

BBC 6 Music Publicity