Post office queues are one of the few social levellers left. The small-time eBay-er must wait his turn with the grandmother collecting her income support and the asylum-seeker posting back the "leave to remain" forms that will change the course of her life. Now that bus queues are more like bus scrums, to spend a quarter of an hour in a relatively orderly public setting can be deeply reassuring. And [...]

The last thing you expect to read, on opening the second autobiography by the former Big Brother contestant Jade Goody, is an extract from Prospect magazine. Like the rest of this book, it's not written by her; it's from a piece by Peter Bazalgette, former chairman of Endemol, the television production company that makes the 24-hour reality programme and its various spin-offs, and was written shortly after Goody was removed [...]

The title of My Ain Folk (1973), the middle film in Bill Douglas's autobiographical trilogy about his harsh childhood in a Scottish mining village, became lodged in my mind many years before I first saw the film itself. Simple, lyrical, mono syllabic, it seemed to conjure a world of intimacy and kinship without sentimentality. Indeed, the trilogy itself seemed the stuff of folklore: I would scour the listings in vain [...]

It is tempting - too tempting - to play the game of "what might have been", or to feel nostalgic for something that never happened. A vast new box set from the British Film Institute, Land of Promise, which collects the most notable films of documentary-makers working between 1930 and 1950, is a compendium of what-ifs, in which the idea of a fair and equal Britain, one brought about by [...]

"The white working class in Britain is put under the spotlight this winter on BBC2," says the press release for the BBC's much-trailed White Season. What, all of it, all at once, for the rest of us to look at? One big pale lump, like a ball of lard, with nary an individual face to be seen nor opinion to be heard? Hmm, thought so. "White Season" - even the [...]

Just when you think it's safe to be a woman and a person at the same time, along comes some divot - a woman, as it happens - to remind you that the opposite still holds. Lesley Douglas, controller of BBC Radio 2 and its digital sister station, 6 Music, had it coming to her when she appeared on Radio 4's Feedback on 15 February to explain why the sexes [...]

Chain Reaction Radio 4

Imagine: the Secret of Life BBC1

How's this for a joke? Alan Yentob on self-help books. Yes, I know. I was in hysterics, too. Like he needs them. But I guess it was one way of dealing with the whole "noddie" controversy: rather than sending someone else to do interviews on his behalf and then naughtily inserting shots of himself later, this film (broadcast 19 February, [...]

KCRW www.kcrw.com

Having spent the past few weeks listening to America's National Public Radio on the internet, and getting used to that funny growling gurgle the signal makes when it's "buffering", my radio nose has led me to the California-based speech and music station KCRW. Until recently I had only heard of its long-running breakfast music show Morning Becomes Eclectic, famed for its British presenter, Nic Harcourt - a sort [...]

BBC Radio 1 97-99FM

One of the few pleasurable things about travelling on a Virgin train - apart from screwing your eyes up tight and willing it to go faster than 90 miles an hour - is that you can plug your headphones into the armrest and listen to the radio. The first ten channels are an airline-style array of fussy pop, twiddly rock, a cocktail-tinted jazz programme and a [...]

The sociologist Richard Sennett has a habit of writing the things that we end up talking about years later. The connection between the two appears slight: rarely do you hear the phrase "As Richard Sennett said . . ." (if only it was uttered more often), yet the subjects of his many books have been unerringly prescient.

The Fall of Public Man, written 31 years ago, expressed unease at our [...]