The Road to Rock’n’Roll (11 October, 10am, Radio 2) is a slightly misleading title for a programme that should content itself with emphasising just how massive a star Bing Crosby was. This documentary features the voices of a number of the people who worked with Crosby on his final trip to the UK, which was 40 years ago this month, and is presented by Elizabeth McGovern. During that final trip, Crosby recorded his Christmas duet with David Bowie, who was then midway between Low and “Heroes”. This was a strange collaboration because neither of them really knew how unique the other was; they just got on with the job. Elsewhere, the 40th anniversary of the release of the single “Heroes”, a flop at the time, is marked by David Bowie’s Heroes 40th Anniversary (10 October, 10am, Radio 2), presented by Florence Welch.
There are still more than 8o opera theatres in Germany alone. If you add in Austria and German-speaking parts of Switzerland there are more than 100. John Tusa was stationed in Germany in the mid-1950s when he was a 19-year-old serviceman. He revisits a few of them as part of John Tusa’s Opera Journey (8 October, 6.45pm, Radio 3) and finds that, like German football clubs, they continue to thrive thanks to fierce pride in local identity.
The days are drawing in and therefore the nation is in the mood for stories about fellow citizens who have been dealt a particularly bad hand by fate. The Reservoir Tapes (8 October, 7.45pm, Radio 4) – a clever combination of prequel and expanded edition of Jon McGregor’s Booker-listed Reservoir 13, in which a girl disappears in the course of a family holiday in the Peak District – is immeasurably enhanced by the narration of some excellent actors playing the different people from whose viewpoint the story is told. In this case it’s Sian Brooke. Meanwhile, Rebus: Fleshmarket Close (7 October, 2.30pm, Radio 4) features Ian Rankin’s detective walking the dank streets of Edinburgh’s old town to find out why two skeletons were found in a pub and why the sister of a raped woman has gone missing. Ron Donachie plays Rebus.
The Sodajerker podcast is the work of Liverpool songwriting duo Simon Barber and Brian O’Connor. They quiz some of the greatest songwriters (including Paul Simon, Loudon Wainwright, Nick Lowe and Gilbert O’Sullivan) about their craft. Lowe talks about the agonising process of writing The Beast in Me for Johnny Cash. Like most of Sodajerker’s interviewees, he made his bones in the days when you needed access to an expensive studio and session musicians in order to realise your song. It’s no longer that way. The people who talk on the edgier Song Exploder have often made their entire record on their desktop. It’s never been easier to compete, but it’s never been harder to win, either.
