Miles Jupp appears to be going through a period when he can do no wrong. At the same time, Lenny Henry is going through a period when we are pleasantly surprised by the range of what he can do. The two are paired in the first of a new series of Boswell’s Lives (Monday, 11.30am, Radio 4), in which famed crumpeteer, and operatically obsequious biographer of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell walks among us once again to kiss the hindquarters of a number of contemporary luminaries. In this case, the luminary is Muhammad Ali, portrayed by Henry with the throaty whisper that could pass for Bob Dylan if he were to pinch his nose at the same time. “Gentle listeners,” simpers Jupp as Boswell, “I have known many singers: Caruso, Gigli, Pavarotti, Domingo, Bono. But Ali was the greatest singer to be heavyweight champion of the world.” Future episodes will see Boswell meeting Karl Marx, Madonna and Alan Bennett.
The Pet Shop Boys are, like Morecambe & Wise, one of those double acts in which one partner appears to do significantly more of the heavy lifting than the other. As in the case of the comics, this is an illusion. In performance, Neil Tennant does the singing, while Chris Lowe loiters in the background, stabbing at a keyboard. Similarly, in interviews, Chris lets Neil do most of the talking, keeping his own contributions pithy and faintly undermining.
This is an act that – as the new four-part documentary Pet Shop Boys (Wednesday, 10pm, Radio 2) serves to remind us – first hung out its shingle fully 30 years ago and has covered a lot of ground, from high culture to low, ever since. Neil and Chris remember signing their first deal with EMI and sniggering about the fact that it called for as many as seven albums, a total they never thought they would manage. To date, they’ve done twice as many. It’s the spoken version of the Pet Shop Boys act that carries this programme every bit as much as the musical one. Neil recalls discovering “to my horror” that Chris liked the records of Imagination when they first met in the early 80s. Chris doesn’t interject at this point. You can nonetheless hear his eyebrows lift. It really is surprising that Radio 2 hasn’t given them a regular show.
In The Women Who Wrote Rock (Tuesday, 11.30am, Radio 4) Kate Mossman goes in search of the female writers who wrote about music back when, as one Beatles sleevenote put it, “pop-picking was a fast and furious business”. This was the era of Rave and Fabulous, colour magazines occupying the ground between the inky weeklies and the teenage girls’ fashion magazines. A lot of the people who wrote for them were young women like Julie Harris and Dawn James, two names that perfectly conjure the full hair-tossing, pillion-riding, kinky boot-wearing 60s zeitgeist.
This week’s Ramblings (Thursday, 3pm, Radio 4) sees Clare Balding follow part of a new pilgrimage trail in the Peak District of Derbyshire. She is met there by the vicar of Eyam, a village that attracts up to 100,000 visitors a year because of its historical association with the plague of the late 17th century. You may have heard the story in school, about how this tiny community managed to contain the spread of the disease by operating their own voluntary quarantine. This meant they saved the rest of northern England at the cost of 200 of their own population.
