Cabin Pressure

Radio 4, 11.30am

The fear and joys of flying have been a comedy staple for decades, and every joke it is possible to make has probably been made. The challenge is to tell the old jokes in a new way. So step forward, experienced wordsmith (Dead Ringers, That Mitchell and Webb Sound/Look) John Finnemore, with this new six-part sitcom about a one-plane outfit run by an autocratic divorcée (Stephanie Cole, doing her usual posh bully bit). Her aircraft has two pilots, one a jaded cynic with a dodgy past who can, though, actually fly (played to worldweary perfection by Roger Allam) and one who seemed to have got his wings through a correspondence college (Benedict Cumberbatch, showing he can do situation comedy as well as he does everything else in the thesp game). Chuck in Finnemore himself as Cole's keen but dim son-of-all work, plus an unusually high level of well-researched technical information about flying, and you have a half-hour that flies by (fnaarg fnaarg).

Night Waves

Radio 3, 9.45pm

It is one of the great ironies that the ratio of people who are starving is the same as that of people who are obese - one in seven. Another statistic - the price of food has risen by 83 per cent across the world in the past three years. And a third - there have been food riots in Indonesia and Haiti, Egypt and Bangladesh. It is against this background that Philip Dodd and a panel of experts consider the why and what to dos about the global food crisis. Could the solution lie in that much-maligned technological innovation, genetic modification?

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