Emma Willis
Radio 2/BBC Sounds, 1pm
Having stepped in for everyone from Sara Cox to Romesh Ranganathan on Radio 2 over the years, Emma Willis, one of the UK’s hardest working presenters, gets her own regular Radio 2 slot, taking over Zoe Ball’s Saturday Lunchtime Show (on air for just over a year since Ball stepped down from Radio 2’s Breakfast Show in Dec 2024) with a new live format that promises lots of special guests, listener-led features and, of course, great music. On a very different note, today’s Opera on 3 (Radio 3, 6pm) is the Met’s acclaimed current production of Carmen, with mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina in the title role and tenor Michael Fabiano, live from New York. Dan Does Dating
Radio 4/BBC Sounds, 11pm
Radio 4’s new late-night comedy ramps up the cringe factor to the point where it’s impossible to feel any sympathy for anti-hero Dan Dickerson (Christopher Macarthur-Boyd), whose inability to find a girlfriend is as self-inflicted as any incel’s. Happily, those unfortunate enough to agree to embark on a date with him give as good as they get, and the sharp script and excellent supporting cast wring plenty of laughs from the self-obsessed delusions of this miserable modern male.
Sunday Feature: The Music Man for Africa
Radio 3/BBC Sounds, 7.15pm
A fascinating celebration of the life of the American “musician, artist, self-taught ethnomusicologist, sound recordist, polyglot and diplomat” Leo Sarkisian, who spent decades travelling around Africa recording countless musicians (including some, like Fela Kuti, who became world famous) for the Voice of America network’s longest-running radio series, Music Time in Africa. A must-listen for anyone interested in the vast cultural sweep of radio, and its role as a soft-power global influence. Currently: Inside ARIA
Radio 4/BBC Sounds, 1.30pm
Evan Davis takes us into the new, UK government-sponsored Advanced Research and Invention Agency, whose mission is to provide funding for scientific and technological breakthroughs to stimulate future prosperity. Inspired by a US agency that helped develop the internet, GPS, and personal computing, ARIA has sunk millions into 12 major programmes – from designing crops with synthetic genomes to developing neuro-technologies for psychiatric illness. But is it a good use of government money?
Eras: Phil Collins
All episodes are available on BBC Sounds today
Ahead of a linear airing starting on Radio 2 next weekend, Sounds drops this five-part tribute to the former Genesis drummer turned 1980s global superstar, who next week hits the grand old age of 75. From the gift of his first drum at the age of three to his latest tours and releases, superfan Zoe Ball traces his life in music through a treasure trove of archive and interviews with, among many others, Bob Geldof, Robert Plant, Richard Branson and Collins’s son Nic. In the final episode, Ball sits down with Collins himself. Understand: An American Journey
Radio 4/BBC Sounds, 11am
Part of the BBC season marking the 250th anniversary of the USA’s founding, James Naughtie takes a trip through time and the country’s epic landscapes to discover how the Declaration of Independence’s call for a nation based on its citizens’ inalienable right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” has lived up to reality two and a half centuries on. In this opener, he examines the key idea of America as a land of opportunity and the link in the national psyche between economic and democratic freedom. Ransom Man
Radio 4/BBC Sounds, 9am
For many, their worst nightmare would be having their most intimate thoughts, fears and feelings exposed to the world. That’s what happened in 2020 to 33,000 users of the Vastaamo psychotherapy service in Finland, whose patient database – including detailed therapy notes – was breached by a hacker who threatened to publish all the information online if a ransom wasn’t paid. Jenny Kleeman investigates what happened next in this six-part podcast from the Intrigue strand. A People’s History of Punk
Radio 4/BBC Sounds, 4pm
Too often now, the story of punk rock is swaddled in the rose-tinted hues of nostalgia. Chris Packham indulges a little but gets the tone right most of the time in his three-part history of a movement that, however much it “came from the council estates”, also relied heavily on art schools for its ethics and aesthetics. In this opener, he takes us back to the dawn of punk, the Sex Pistols’ first gig in 1975, exploring how it sowed the seeds of musical revolution among the disillusioned youth of Thatcher’s Britain.
The History Bureau: Putin and the Apartment Bombs
Radio 4, 9.30am; all episodes are available on BBC Sounds today
This gripping seven-part podcast explores alleged links between Russia’s federal security service (the FSB) and the bombing in 1999 of four residential apartment blocks across Russia in which 300 people lost their lives. Were the atrocities committed by Chechen terrorists, as then newly-elected prime minister Vladimir Putin claimed, or were more sinister forces at work? Today’s opener sets the scene in the febrile years following the Soviet Union’s collapse. Human Intelligence
Radio 4/BBC Sounds, 1.45pm
Naomi Alderman presents a further handful of brilliant, bite-sized biographies of history’s most significant thinkers. This week her theme is famous recluses, ranging from author Emily Brontë and Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun to the 12th-century Chinese poet Li Qingzhao, inventor Nikola Tesla and, today’s subject, Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne, whose Essays were a key influence for centuries. The Missing Cryptoqueen
BBC Sounds
Four new episodes from the long-running podcast bring us up to date with the latest theories about Dr Ruja Ignatova, on the run since 2017 and accused of defrauding countless victims of billions of dollars in the One Coin currency scam. Was she murdered by co-conspirators? Or is she, as new rumours suggest, alive and living quietly in Cape Town? Elsewhere, the compulsive weekly podcast from US attorney Dean Strang and UK trial lawyer Jonathan Goldberg KC, I Rest My Case (all podcast platforms) continues to pull back the curtain on high-profile trials on both sides of the Atlantic, including, this week, Kevin Spacey’s. The Essay: Stories from the Museum of Music History
Radio 3/BBC Sounds, 9.45pm
The peak of a week of fascinating essays on the more unusual items curated by the Museum of Music History, ranging from a piano owned by Napoleon to a scrap of music picked up at Waterloo. On Thursday, Museum director Kate Kennedy looks at an Anglo-Saxon lyre reconstructed from a handful of fragments excavated at the Sutton Hoo burial grounds in Suffolk. It’s an instrument that invites us into the sound-world of a far-distant time and offers clues about the interplay of words and music in Anglo-Saxon culture. Wolf Valley
Radio 4/BBC Sounds, 2.15pm
Atmosphere and an adhesive grip are qualities common to many of the dramas in the BBC’s Limelight thriller strand. This new five-part Nordic noir drama is no exception, with Amrita Acharia leading a superb international cast as a Norwegian-British crime investigator forced to confront her troubled past when she’s drawn into the death of an eco-journalist at a remote salmon-farming complex in the fjords.