Radio and podcasts of the week

Saturday 6 September

Jazz FM’s Guide to the Labels 
Jazz FM/Rayo, 9pm 
When you think of great 20th-century jazz, certain labels come to mind: Blue Note, Atlantic and, of course, Columbia. Presenter Danielle Perry begins a new run of guides to the greats with Columbia Records, which recorded Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus and many more. Tonight, Perry explores the pinnacles of Columbia’s musical legacy, and tomorrow, at the same time, looks in detail at the label’s history from its founding in 1889.

World Book Club 
World Service/BBC Sounds, 12.05pm
Calling all Sherlock Holmes devotees: a special edition devoted to the most iconic novel in the canon, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Recorded in front of a live audience at the Edinburgh Festival, host Harriett Gilbert is joined by bestselling crime author Val McDermid and Arthur Conan Doyle devotee Dr Mark Jones to discuss such pressing issues as whether fictional detectives need to be more than a little insufferable, and whether the novel’s gothic atmosphere has had more lasting impact on the crime genre than Holmes’s celebrated deductive reasoning.

Sunday 7 September

Spinal Tap II on Radio 2 
BBC Sounds
This airs on Radio 2 at midnight, but most will choose to listen during normal waking hours on BBC Sounds. This programme finds the cast of the iconic rock comedy’s long-awaited sequel, released this week, in character as Nigel Tufnel, David St Hubbins, Derek Smalls and rockumentarian Marti Di Bergi, and sharing favourite memories and tracks with Radio 2’s Shaun Keavney.

Sue Brodie takes part in The Reunion – Charlotte Graham

The Reunion 
Radio 4/BBC Sounds, 10am
Midway through a 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup tournament that’s broken records for attendance and TV audiences, Kirsty Wark takes us back to 1991 and the first-ever Women’s Rugby World Cup in South Wales in 1991. Among the pioneers she gathers to recall it are former England internationals Sue Dorrington, Mary Forsyth, Alice Cooper and Deborah Griffin, plus one of the founders of the follow-on 1994 tournament in Scotland, Sue Brodie, and Wales international Amanda Bennett.

BBC Proms 2025 
Radio 3/BBC Sounds, from 11am
A day of top-flight concerts begins with the Royal Philharmonic in urban mode playing Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony and Respighi’s Pines of Rome. At 3pm, five-time Grammy-winner Angélique Kidjo brings the sound of Africa to Bradford with a selection of her own work plus hits from the likes of Fela Kuti, Hugh Masekela and Youssou N’Dour. Lastly, back at the Royal Albert Hall at 7.30pm, there’s Grieg’s Piano Concerto, featuring soloist Lukas Sternath, plus Ruth Gipps’s Death on the Pale Horse and Arthur Bliss’s The Beatitudes.

Monday 8 September

Star Trek: Khan 
Weekly, all platforms 
Monday is World Star Trek Day, and a major treat awaits fans of the iconic sci-fi series as its most notorious antagonist returns in this impressive nine-episode scripted podcast. The story prefigures that of the 1982 film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, chronicling Khan’s descent from superhuman visionary into vengeful villain. Naveen Andrews is terrific in the lead, ably supported by Wrenn Schmidt as Lt Marla McGivers and Trek veteran George Takei as Sulu.

The History Podcast: The Fort 
Radio 4/BBC Sounds, 1.45pm
Graphic eye-witness accounts by soldiers who were on the ground give a vividly true-to-life feel to this series about an extraordinary action by British forces during the battle for a key Taliban bastion, Jugroom Fort, in Helmand in 2007. When a chaotic withdrawal in the face of heavy resistance leaves one man stranded in enemy territory, a daring rescue mission unfolds.

Tuesday 9 September

Marisa Abela leads an all-star cast as Elizabeth Bennet – Jem Mitchell

Pride and Prejudice 
Audible
Audible joins the celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth with this sizzling new podcast adaptation featuring a cracking cast and a unique interior narrative from heroine Elizabeth Bennet’s perspective. Bafta-winning Industry star Marisa Abela takes the lead role, with Babygirl hunk Harris Dickinson as Mr Darcy. The impressive ensemble cast also includes Bill Nighy as Mr Bennet, Will Poulter as Mr Wickham, Jessie Buckley as Caroline Bingley, Toheeb Jimoh as Mr Bingley, Bertie Carvel as Mr Collins and Glenn Close as Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Finding Elgar 
Radio 4/BBC Sounds, 4pm
An upbeat, entertainingly accessible tour through the life of one of our greatest classical musicians. Adrian Chiles goes in search of the spirit of Edward Elgar – a “fellow son of Worcestershire” that he feels he doesn’t know enough about – tracing his roots and musical mission through the “outsider” lens of Elgar’s upbringing as a provincial, lower middle class Catholic who struggled to gain acceptance in the rarefied world of Britain’s Victorian and Edwardian musical elite.

Wednesday 10 September

Kate Moss hosts a new series on David Bowie – Sukita

David Bowie: Changeling 
BBC Sounds
Ahead of airing on Radio 6 Music later this month, supermodel and long-time Bowie confidante Kate Moss hosts this eight-part podcast focused on the intense five years of creative evolution from 1970 to 1975 that took Bowie from The Man Who Sold the World to Ziggy Stardust and on to the Thin White Duke. Boy George, Chrissie Hynde, Elton John, Iggy Pop and Twiggy are among the contributors. Also on Wednesday, the shortlist for the Mercury Prize for Album of the Year is announced on Lauren Laverne (Radio 6 Music, 10am) with tracks and reactions on BBC Sounds.

Ria Lina Gets Forensic 
Radio 4/BBC Sounds, 11pm
Comedian, brainbox and one-time forensics student Ria Lina puts her scientific acumen to good use by subjecting anti-ageing and cosmetic therapies to a test. In the first part of this new series, she invites comedian, actress and ace-improviser Cariad Lloyd to join her in an airtight capsule to see if Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy can help clear brain fog. Not exactly what we’ve come to expect in a Radio 4 late-night comedy slot, but very funny in parts.

Thursday 11 September

Alicia Vikander and John Wilson – BBC

This Cultural Life 
Radio 4/BBC Sounds, 11am 
John Wilson’s guest this week is the Oscar-winning Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, celebrated for her ability to morph into hugely different characters and roles – from a humanoid robot in Ex Machina via adventurer Lara Croft in the 2018 Tomb Raider reboot to Henry VIII’s last queen, Catherine Parr, in 2023’s Firebrand. Born into an acting family, she reveals how she first performed on stage at the age of seven in a musical written by Benny and Bjorn of Abba and trained as a ballet dancer until injury forced her to turn again to acting.

Dough 
Radio 4/BBC Sounds, 12.30pm
In an entertaining edition, Greg Foot and his team of technological prognosticators look at the future of housebuilding and how new developments could see homes built, finally, to a higher standard and made cheaper to run. Will houses soon be built by robot bricklayers, or will bricklaying itself become a thing of the past with the advent of 3D printing in concrete? Among the guests is Salar al Khafaji, founder of a company that makes autonomous on-site construction robots.

Friday 12 September

The Food Programme visits Melton Mowbray – John W Banagan

The Food Programme 
Radio 4/BBC Sounds, 11am 
Food as a source of tourism income is booming. In this week’s edition, Sheila Dillon investigates the growing number of food tours and trails in the UK as consumers show more and more interest in the provenance and production of what goes on their plate. She takes a trip to the self-styled Rural Capital of Food, Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire and joins a walking tour that spans pork pie producers, stilton sellers, a “samosa wallah” and a prizewinning brewery.

BBC Proms 2025 
Radio 3, 7.30pm 
The penultimate Prom of the 2025 season is a proper crowd-pleaser by one of the great festival favourites, conductor John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London. Love is the theme of a passion-filled evening that begins with Strauss’s swashbuckling tone-poem Don Juan, and closes with the sensuous textures of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe. At the centre is one of Bernstein’s most lyrical orchestral pieces Serenade, a meditation on the nature of love, featuring acclaimed soloist James Ehnes.

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