BBC Radio 4's ingeniously ambiguous series of 15-minute programmes Street Science (1-5 December, 3.45pm) takes leading scientists out of their laboratories to meet "real people". In the first, Stephen Minger, senior lecturer in stem-cell biology, visited a rural Anglican church to speak to the parishioners about experimentation on embryos.

Before, in the car, he confessed it was hard to come by human eggs. "We thought it was unjustified ethically to [...]

Radio 2's documentary marking the 40th anniversary of the release of the Beatles' White Album (22 November, 7pm) memorably used a mass of interviews with the articulate engineers present during the fractious recording, focusing on their revolutionary use of microphones under water, or the days spent with the band crammed into a broom cupboard in Abbey Road for the hell of it (with, one always imagines, the dreaded Yoko on [...]

Radio 4's The Goulash Archipelago (21 November, 11am) was a captivating documentary that followed two musicians as they travelled from Budapest deep into Transylvania's Carpathian mountains without offering money for their food - only music. The British jazz bass player Arnie Somogyi was the convivial narrator, but his companion, Zsolt Bende - a Hungarian guitarist - emerged as the star, a wry figure fond of the word "actually" and forever [...]

Radio 2 has been through the wringer of late. But in the fallout of the Brand'n'Ross H-bomb it is important to remember the station's more interesting late-night gambles. Every Tuesday evening for half an hour, just after Radcliffe and Maconie (Monday-Thursday, 8pm-10pm) have warmed our ears with their records and brew-like northern baritones, we get a show that pays homage to the organ; not the sort that Brand is obsessed [...]

It's several months since the purchase of Virgin Radio for £53m by the Times of India, or rather its Mumbai-based owner the Times Group. Virgin used to be a comfortable, bloke-rocking, "Hotel California" kind of station. In September, it was audaciously rebranded Absolute Radio, a go-for-broke name if ever there was one.

Absolute is the UK's first new national radio station for 13 years. It's an interesting piece of [...]

Say this phrase softly: Saturday morning programming. Isn't that lovely? These three words should fall on week-weary ears like manna from heaven, summoning up the ghost of DLT meandering his way daftly through a quiz. But where, in 2008, is that gentle comic touch? With TV stuffed to the gizzards with smug cookery shows, Jonathan Ross's sarcastic tongue becoming sharper by the Saturday, and Fi Glover's drollery reaching priggish heights, [...]

Crash. Tinkle. Boom. Sorry, BOOM. "This one's going out to my students struggling in education to get a qualification . . . everyone standing on a street corner, doing it from a love for money . . . we got the new Eminem, he's on the relapse . . . If it's your birthday, holla at us now."

Tim Westwood is 51. He presents Radio 1's rap show, now known [...]

Old Radio 4 programmes never die. They just retire to a sleepy digital backwater known as BBC7. Its mainstays are washed-up soaps, well-thumbed Books of the Week and, best of all, Kenneths Williams and Horne, the long-since departed duo at the centre of the Fifties and Sixties sketch shows Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne (the former has just finished for the time being; one or the other will [...]

The age of austerity is upon us. The time for ferreting and hunting has come. Farming Today (Mondays to Saturdays, Radio 4, 5.45am) has spoken!

If only the rest of you had been awake to hear. We must turn back the clock "to the meat enjoyed by our parsimonious grandparents". We must prepare to squeeze the urine from the bladders of wild rabbits and place the carcasses in huge communal [...]

Not much happened in Julie Walters's early life, which is what made the first episodes of her self-narrated memoir That's Another Story (Book of the Week, 9.45am and 12.30am, daily until 3 October, Radio 4) such a whizz.

The stuff she conjured. Her mother snapping, "Put him back in" when Julie's fat brother was born. A boy called Robert, on Longwide Road somewhere in the Midlands in the late 1950s, [...]