Unmasking the English, Radio 4, 9am and 9.30pm

Andrew Marr cranks up his Scottishness to cast a “sidelong look”, as they say in inverted commas, at the English. He says he is trying to get to the essential truths of Englishness; although in the first of these four programmes, at any rate, he seems content to perpetuate its myths. But perhaps that is because they aren’t myths at all. Drawing from such real-life examples as Miss Marple and fictional characters such as Boris Johnson, Marr paints a wonderfully entertaining picture that can only obscure as much as it reveals.

Actors’s Words, Radio 4, 3.30pm

Thespians are just so utterly, well . . . brave is the only way to describe it. Here five of them, masters and mistresses of their chosen, thrice-damned craft, somehow find the time, the spark and the sheer damned guts to put pen to paper in a week of short stories what they have wrote.

The first is Le Rayon Vert by Tim Pigott-Smith. The narrator surveys the tumult of summer while keeping a lookout for the famous light effect in the evening sky – the green flash of the title – the sight of which is said to convey good fortune. It heaves with metaphors. Love it, darling. Stories by Nigel Havers, Siân Phillips, Richard Griffiths and Imogen Stubbs follow, all of them read by the authors themselves, in their very own voices. Truly, we are blessed.

6 Music Plays It Again, BBC 6 Music, 9.30pm

Johnnie Walker tells, in three parts, the story of the magnificently snide Steely Dan, the pop-jazz-art rock band made up of Walter Becker, Donald Fagen and a supporting cast of some of America’s finest musicians of the past 30-plus years.

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