Radio

SATURDAY

Counter-tenors are a dime a dozen these days, but this wasn't always the way; before Alfred Deller came on the scene, the sound of the counter-tenor had been all but forgotten. In Vintage Years (1.20pm R3), fellow singers recall the shock of hearing Deller's voice for the first time.

After that, another musical peculiarity: in The Classical Accordion (3.20pm R3), Gareth Owen plays part of Messiaen's organ cycle, La Nativite du Seigneur, on the old squeezebox. And peculiarity of another kind in Jesus Christ Superstar (7.30pm R2), which offers the unholy trinity of Roger Daltrey, Spandau Ballet's Tony Hadley and Julian Clary, united by the melodies of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

SUNDAY

After last week's look at paranoia and science-fiction in the Fifties, a reminder that the decade wasn't all fun: Generating the Beats (5.45pm R3) looks at the careers of Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and their chums, through the eyes of the eccentric author Iain Sinclair. Were they genuinely a movement, he asks, or have they been manufactured into one?

MONDAY

The post-concert evening documentary strand on Radio 3 this week offers a variety of other perspectives on Fifties Writing (9.15pm tonight, various times throughout the week) - today, the subject is why literature didn't mention the war. Later programmes look, predictably enough, at "The Movement" and the "Angry Young Men"; the most entertaining promises to be Fred Inglis's defence of FR Leavis, on Friday.

TUESDAY

There is, despite the title, nothing terrifically new about The New Sexual Nature (8.30pm R4): Gillian Rice's evolutionary biologist's-eye-view of human sexual habits is really nothing more than an updating of the saucier bits of Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape and Manwatching. It suffers from Rice's cheery determination to sound unembarrassed by any of this, too. But you can pick up plenty of facts to impress your friends: did you know, for instance, that the human penis is the perfect shape to act as a suction pump, pushing out the sperm of competing males? Don't you feel pleased you know it now?

WEDNESDAY

It is time to call a halt to the madness of Sixties and Seventies kitsch nostalgia. For too long, the nation's youth has been subjected to reruns of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), The Persuaders, The Champions, The Avengers (worse, The New Avengers). For too long, we've had to put up with cheap parodies of the era - and we can include Radio Tip Top (9pm R1) here.

Fab TV (11pm R4), a four-part skit which starts with an Avengers-style adventure called The Preventers, is quite funny, and features the voice of Desmond Llewelyn (aka Q, from the Bond films), so we'll let this one go. But no more.

THURSDAY

It's 1942: Alan Ladd is due to go into the navy, and Paramount needs to get one last film out of him before he goes. John Houseman is put in charge, and he hires Raymond Chandler to write the script. Chandler has a brilliant idea, but gets writer's block; and unblocking turns out to be an unexpectedly dangerous business.

Ray Connolly's Lost Fortnight (2pm R4), based on Houseman's memoir of the making of The Blue Dahlia, catches an atmosphere of intrigue and desperation, and manages to echo the noir tone of the finished film, without being taken over by it. Nice.