Key Matters, Radio 4, Monday to Friday<br/>The Brown Years, Radio 4, Tuesday<br/>Witness, World Service, All Week

Major joys and minor catastrophes

(GERALDO CASO / EPA )

How can I convey the sheer brilliance of Key Matters?

Presented by Ivan Hewitt, it's a simple idea: a series of 15-minute programmes each devoted to a musical key. The first three were gripping: we were in A major on Monday, all happiness, innocence and good cheer; on Tuesday the strange and remote C sharp major, "the Pluto of musical keys" with its seven sharps; and on Wednesday, E minor, sober, serious and fateful.

For the last, Hewitt met the cellist and composer Philip Sheppard, who described how in E minor the tonal quality of the cello closes down – the chord "vacuums space back to itself". It sounded slightly airy-fairy; then he played a D minor chord and the cello rang out, and then E minor. There was nothing; the sound was dead. On Tuesday the composer Kenneth Hamilton was good on C sharp major, too – "the more sharps and flats, the more profound the emotions, the more intimate, the more hidden the meaning".

Gordon Brown's tenure as prime minister began in A major, you might say, went through various states equating to C sharp but ended very firmly in E minor. Steve Richards, The Independent's man at Westminster, has a book out about the whole sorry saga, and in The Brown Years (part one of three) he spoke to many of the main players, who were extraordinarily obliging in providing an intimate portrait of the king and his court.

The pleasure was in the detail, such as the former Blair adviser Steve Morris recalling that when Brown moved into No 10, his predecessor's desk, which had faced the door, was moved out of sight and a picture of a sunny seascape was removed.

So, there were rectangles on the wall and on the carpet where they'd been – ghostly after-images of the ancien régime.

Brown didn't come across badly, but he must have been a pain to work for. "I was awestruck by the relentless force with which he worked," said Morris, "the hours he kept, the barrage of demands and emails. He worked at a frantic pace." But, crucially, he "never seemed to be happy ... he always seemed to be somewhere between rage and despair".

Another excellent strand last week was Witness, daily 10-minute first-hand accounts of historical events. Wednesday's featured the BBC's Iranian presenter Pooneh Ghoddoosi, who was a young girl in Tehran when the Iran-Iraq war broke out. She recalled following missile trails in the sky and racing over to see the damage. She also remembered going to parties and wondering why everyone was crying, until she realised she was at a secret leaving do for some 18-year-old lad avoiding conscription, who next morning would be crossing the border illegally into Turkey or Pakistan. If Witness had had a musical score, the key of E minor would have been perfect.