John Robins: Why Alcohol Was Never the Real P...

When Charlie Higson was 18, his mother died, his father moved to Hawaii and he decided to become someone else entirely. He dyed his hair, renamed himself Switch and threw himself into the punk scene in Norwich, where a chance friendship with Paul Whitehouse would eventually help ...  Show more

Eric Idle has spent a lifetime finding the funny side of almost everything. Long before he became one of the defining voices of British comedy, he was a boy shaped by loss, separation and a brutal education. His father died when Eric was just two years old, and at seven he was se ...  Show more

Poet Fiona Sampson, conductor Alice Farnham, and broadcaster Tom Service join Ian McMillan to explore the maths, metaphors and musical terms that make up the language of conducting. Plus comedy writer Jack Bernhardt takes a sideways look at Hollywood's take on the tortured genius ...  Show more

This week, we drop in on a conversation between Mary Beard and two former TLS editors; and Anne Enright joins us to talk about turning poet in her new novel.'Emperor of Rome: Ruling the ancient Roman world', by Mary Beard'Big Caesars and little Caesars: How they rise and how they ...  Show more

Award winning comedian and actor Omid Djalili joins us to talk about his route to fame, taking part in Splash, quiz show catchphrases, performing in Persian for the first time recently and getting back on stage after lockdown.

In 1974, aged 17, Debbie Gayle travelled to ...

Code Switch's Kumari Devarajan found an unlikely demographic doppelganger in D'Lo, a comedian and playwright whose one-person show about growing up as a queer child of immigrants in the U.S. is reopening on a bigger theater stage. But when you share so much in common with a stran ...  Show more