Radio: I spy with my little feet

HEINZI DOPPELDREK was a German band-leader with a secret mission. When Goebbels reluctantly permitted the troops of the Wehrmacht to listen to decadent jazz, in 1942, Heinzi's band was distinguished by the staccato tap-dancing of its leader - which was, occasionally, wildly erratic. At Bletchley, idly monitoring this stuff, a code-breaker had the sudden idea that there could be more to it, and he was right. The secret code of the dancer's tapping feet informed the allies of planned Nazi troop movements: Doppeldrek was a Great Spy, Lousy Tap-Dancer (R3).

Painstaking research led presenter Sydney Anglo to the wily American general who cracked the code, then to a startlingly scatological old German and finally to an elderly chanteuse who had sometimes sung with the band. Sadly, nobody could discover what had happened to Heinzi himself: after his last dance- routine revealed the story of the Stauffenburg plot, his broadcasts abruptly ceased. Perhaps he'll turn up on 1 April.

With a smile and a twist of the mirrored globe, we step into a vast ballroom and the dazzle of a thousand sparkling sequins, as another legendary dancer returns to the radio, his original home. For those of us who fondly remember gasping with delighted incredulity at the Military Two-Step on Come Dancing, R2 offered Let's Dance. It had all the right ingredients, save the final flourish of a formation team, and there was a portrait of Victor Sylvester thrown in. It was Sylvester's Thirties radio show that eventually became the sadly axed television spectacular, and now, all over the land, carpets were rolled back and listeners swayed to "Puff the Magic Dragon", played as, guess what, a gavotte. Some people really know how to enjoy themselves - and this was not a spoof.

We shouldn't really be surprised. We're always being told by that ubiquitous Oxford professor of happiness that all we need for perfect bliss is a merry dance. They all know about it in Ireland, where otherwise sedate housewives go out five nights a week for a spot of set-dancing For Love, Not Money (R2). This gentle series celebrating the amateur arts was introduced by Alan Titchmarsh, proudly presenting his credentials as seasoned bell- ringer and scenery-painter. He gave set-dancing a distinguished history. After the Napoleonic wars, he said, dancing masters would cycle around Ireland, teaching the fiddle and fancy footwork. Funny, I hadn't realised bicycles reached Ireland so long before they got anywhere else: the things you can learn from the radio ...

Paul Tomlinson's quest for knowledge took him from Bulowayo to Buckinghamshire, looking for his ancestors. Though it was a personal history, this quest included a larger, darker tale. The 1820 Settlers were 4,000 people who were left stranded without employment in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and had been persuaded to emigrate to South Africa. You will thrive on your own land, they were told, If the Snakes Don't Get You (R4). Like the descendants of the Mayflower pilgrims, Tomlinson longed to discover that his own forefathers were among the Settlers.

The programme followed his investigation down many a false trail. Frankly, if your name wasn't Tomlinson, you could have lost interest during these passages, but the records he turned up describing the hardships of immigrants' lives made it seem that transportation to Botany Bay might have been a soft option (a fiddle and an Irish bicycle even softer). You needed stamina, he said, to fight at Waterloo, then spend four months at sea, then bump into an African ostrich or a pack of wild dogs. Come to think of it, Tomlinson's history was a little wobbly here. Surely the 1820 Settlers had five years to recover from Waterloo? Still, it was pleasing that he proved at last to be descended from a Settler's brother, which was pretty close to being authentic.

Back to Ireland for a mesmeric reading by the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. His poem Station Island (R3) was inspired by pilgrimages he made to the island in the middle of Lough Derg, where the faithful Irish still submit to a penitential session known as St Patrick's Purgatory. Heaney is an alchemist who takes the common currency of speech and turns it to priceless, glittering gold. Images tumble after each other in his lines, each leaving you gasping, without time enough to absorb its implication before the next is on you. On the page, such poetry is powerful: read aloud, it's concussive.

The poem ends triumphantly with the poet-narrator confronted by the shade of James Joyce - a tall man, "straight as a rush upon his ashplant", his voice "definite as a steel nib's downstroke" - urging the poet to strike his note, to take off and to write for the joy of it, to "fill the element with signatures on your own frequency". It was a privilege to tune into it.

Another great man produced a similar sense of awe in your reviewer on Friday. Alistair Cooke (see Review, page 25) was interviewed by John Tidmarsh for Outlook (WS), to mark the 50th anniversary of Letter from America, broadcast this weekend. His memory is a vast archive with instant access, more impressive in its scope and detail than the Internet. Yet, even more than that, he can conjure the words to transport his listener to the very table where Roosevelt selected a lobster with aplomb, from the platter presented by Duke Ellington's father, or to a Blackpool beach filled with drilling GIs during the Great War, or to the sandwich bar where his neighbour proved to be Harry Truman, in an electric-blue suit so dazzling it made you sneeze.

Unconstrained by having to fill 15 minutes on his own, his mood was relaxed, expansive and as thoroughly cheerful as he deserves to be. He sounds like a man with nothing to hide. He could well afford to quote H L Mencken's definition of self-respect: it is the secure feeling that no-one - as yet - is suspicious.