Dermot O'Leary
Radio 2

On Radio 2, the American actress and singer Juliette Lewis was talking to Dermot O'Leary before a live session with her new band (12 June, 3pm). "Are we ahn nar?" she asked, in that familiar, thumb-sucking Cape Fear drawl that always studiedly teeters between suggesting she might whip her top open and give a flash of those Goldie Hawn mini-hooters - or just knee her interlocutor in the groin. It doesn't really matter what Lewis says.It could in fact be a duck talking Slovakian, but that phoney, monotone, movie-concocted drawl is the international sound of charisma, and understandable anywhere.

“Er, y-yeah," stuttered O'Leary, mesmerised by the hundred different ways Juliette can spin on a single vowel. A moment passed during which time Dermot's ice-cool professional brain inexplicably urged him to tell Lewis that, even though he'd had only five hours' sleep, he really loved his job. Thankfully, Juliette immediately brought the subject back to Juliette. "Let me explain something. We were on, like, a tour burs, and we watched Chinatarn until 4am."

Hold it together, Dermot. "Erm, well, your album Kicks Ass!" (Did you really say that, Dermot? And in an American accent! My sympathies.) There was nothing for it: O'Leary was forced to refer to the album's artwork, always a last resort. "That's a proper bull, not a cow!" scoffed Juliette. "And if I envisage myself holding a bull on a leash then ahm lark - so be it."

Elsewhere, an episode of A History of the World in 100 Objects (weekdays, 9.45am and 7.45pm) considered fragments of wall painting from a 9th-century harem in Samarra (modern-day Iraq) and managed to avoid using the word sex altogether. The girls and women in the harem, said Neil MacGregor, were called on to "give entertainment" and "nights of music". MacGregor's voice was heavy with subtext and quite transported, as though these small fragments - eyes, mouths, hands - were the quintessence of everything he had talked about in the series so far.

Consecration and desecration, things at once full of consequence and inconsequential, creatures of weird sounds, and silence. He was ahn, but pleasantly elsewhere.