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Bowie and Beyond: A Music Fan's Guide to Berlin (6 Music) | iPlayer
Adam Buxton on David Bowie (6 Music) | iPlayer
Mark Thomas: Bravo Figaro (R4) | iPlayer
Making News (R4) | iPlayer
Messy, Isn't It? The Life and Works of Richard Brautigan (R4) | iPlayer
Fingers on the iPlayer, listeners, there's a lot of good stuff this week… If you're quick, and you're not yet Bowie-sated, you might just catch some of last weekend's Dame David-fest on 6 Music. Danny Robins's Fan's Guide to Berlin was packed with information and music, with more than 50 songs woven through just 60 minutes; Adam Buxton's mad two hours as hilarious as you'd expect. At one point, Bowie talks through his post-Ziggy character options with first wife Angie. It comes down to Aladdin Sane… or Cobbler Bob. And if you want more of the Thinnest White Duke Ever – did you know that in 2003, when Vogue asked Kate Moss to wear one of Bowie's Ziggy cat-suits for a photo shoot, she couldn't get into it? True fact – then Absolute has a three-part documentary, narrated by Tim Minchin, starting tonight at 7pm.
But the best combination of music, humour and real-life drama I heard last week was on Radio 4. Mark Thomas, known for political comedy, gave us Bravo Figaro, his standup show from last year's Edinburgh festival. Since then he's taken it on tour, apparently, though it had passed me by. I feel very lucky to have stumbled across it on late-night radio.
Essentially it was a short journey around his dad, Colin – "the rudest man in south London" – with Mark being funny and truthful, and peppering his tale with recorded interviews with his family. We knew that Colin wasn't well from the start: the show opened with the sound of him breathing and talking with difficulty, his wife, Mark's mum, fussing and chattering around him like an anxious sparrow. Mark performed with bombast and to-the-gut honesty; the show rattled along like a juggernaut. You were breathless keeping up. Every time you thought Mark was showing off, he called himself out. Every time you found yourself turning his dad into a cute character, Mark confronted you with what was real. The story, with all its stories within, was brilliantly told.
When Colin had been well he'd loved opera, and quite unbelievably Mark found himself in a position to get Royal Opera singers to perform in Colin's bungalow. Which they did, and we heard it, and it was great; but that wasn't what left the punch to the heart. That was done by Mark, who closed the show by acknowledging that this was a staged goodbye to his dad, that the real end would be "messy and smell of fear" and would lack the delight and beauty of this, his wonderful, powerful tribute. And then the programme ended and the announcer told us that Colin had died that morning.
Everything else seemed rather vanilla after that, but I enjoyed the first part of Making News, a new three-parter where Steve Richards tries to work out what makes the headlines and why. There were some lovely moments, especially Jon Snow getting overexcited about Beyoncé miming at Obama's inauguration. "It's a fantastic story!" he bellowed, and confessed to pausing the TV footage, over and over, trying to catch Beyoncé in the act of not singing. It was rather less lovely to hear from Roger Alton that a murder is more likely to make the front page if the victim is a pretty girl; Snow, to his credit, said he argues a lot against putting lurid, not-very-representative deaths on the Channel 4 news. Violent crime is going down, though you wouldn't know it from some of our front pages. Making News was sparky stuff and nicely presented. I wonder, a little, how interesting non-media junkies would find it – but, you know, I love the news, so I don't really care.
Jarvis Cocker, who hops between 6 Music and Radio 4 with ease and charm, brought us one of his loves this week. Richard Brautigan, an American author who wrote during the time of the beatniks but wasn't one of them – as one interviewee pointed out, he wasn't born to money, unlike Ginsberg or Burrows – wrote simple sentences and short books about everyday, magical things. "You could read one of his books in an afternoon," said Jarvis to the members of Lancaster indie band the Lovely Eggs, who have a song with the refrain "Have you ever heard of Richard Brautigan?". They played the song; it was delightfully Cherry Red (for those of you who remember the mid-80s).
The programme opened sadly, with a description of the discovery of Brautigan's body, a month after he had killed himself. His corpse was so decomposed it was almost liquid. It had stained the wood floor where it was found. A tragic end, but a sweet legacy, as told by Jarvis.
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