The BBC and the Closet
Radio 4, 11.30am
There is a lot to criticise about the present, but you could play Chris Ledgard’s programme to your average modern teen and he or she would be unsure as to whether they should laugh at the story he tells of the battle within the BBC to make programmes about homosexuality in the Fifties and Sixties or be horrified. Men jailed for 18 months for their love letters? High-ups in the BBC writing memos describing all homosexuals as predatory paedophiles, or giving warning against granting airtime to “queers” for fear of tipping the sexually undecided over the edge? It happened, and it’s here.

At the centre is a man named Colin Thomas – heterosexual, as it happens – who in 1963 suggested that he make a programme in which six gay men talked about lives. He finally got his way, but before that he came up against an institutional homophobia remarkable in an organisation in which so many of the brightest were gay. We hear too from some of the men, prisoners of their sexuality reporting from their own Guantanamo Bay.

The Lawrence Sweeney Mix
Radio 4, 6.30pm
The only drawback to this second (four-part) series of improvised comedy recorded in front of an audience is the same as the drawback to the first – you can’t see Josie Lawrence. One supposes that there will be those similarly bereft at not having the full-on Jim Sweeney experience either. That quibble aside, improv fans can tune in confident that the quality remains extremely high as the two riff off suggestions from the audience, adopting a variety of outrageous accents and doing their best to make the other corpse. Cheap entertainment at its finest – and no musical segments, either. Bonus.

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