It is a mark of the respect Pete Townshend commands that he can make a programme called Baroque and Roll — Townshend and Purcell (Radio 4, Tuesday) without the great listening public thinking he’s having a laugh. Townshend? Maximum R&B Pete? From whence the baroque filigree?

“Purcell pushed the rules of harmony,” he began, “and it was that courage that I could interpolate into my rock’n’roll writing” — which only served to introduced the end of Won’t Get Fooled Again where Roger Daltrey goes “Yeeeaaahhh” and Townshend goes thrash thrash thrash and the listener staggers away, ears bleeding but happy. A sort of courage there, certainly — not least in that Daltrey came screaming in over the synthesizer loop that only Townshend would have thought of putting on a rock track — but harmony? Up in Heaven, Purcell stopped head banging and wondered what the leader of the Who was on about, as was the listener down on Earth.

So Townshend told a story about how, when he was a kid, he came to love classical music, going to hear Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and finding it “a cosmic experience. Thereafter I began to have” — reminiscent chuckle — “aural hallucinations.”

He began to build up a classical music collection that would have been larger but for two things — “My father, despite being a working musician, didn’t have a piano and our record player was crap.” Three things, actually. “The main thing, though, was the snobbery of the record shops. You’d go in and say: ‘I want that Bach thing that goes [beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth] and they’d go: “That’s not Bach, son.’ And they wouldn’t tell you what it was.”

Undaunted, Townshend sought out shops that weren’t run by musical fascists, and by the time he had formed the Who he was ready for the hard stuff. “Kit Lambert, the Who’s manager, gave me a recording of Purcell’s Gordion Knot Unty’d,“he said. “It seemed to be quintessentially English, the point at which English music began. It went into my body and stayed there ever since.”

Yup, fine, but how did what was in his body leak out into the Who? “Right the way through that first album, My Generation, I was experimenting with suspensions. I was listening to that stuff [Purcell]and trying to get it to speak through the chords on the guitar.” Snatch of The Kids are Alright. No, still don’t get it. Townshend tried again. “When you listen to Purcell’s more complex work, when you hear him experiment in a way that must have disturbed audiences of the time — he would take a chord and move a note through the middle of it — when you hear it you think: ‘God this man must have been in some pain because he’s creating dissonance and when it’s resolved you get this incredible sense of relief and, if it resolves into a minor, this incredible sense of tragic relief.”

And that’s where it all made sense. That’s where Purcell touched Townshend and where, for more than 40 years, Townshend has touched us. Pain and tragic relief, separated by more than 350 years. The rest of the programme was padding — wonderful padding, for anyone who loves the Who (if not Purcell), but no more than corroborative detail that added further verisimilitude to a narrative that had already convinced, to misquote W.S. Gilbert. Immersion in Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas made Townshend come up with his own rock operas. The opening to Pinball Wizard, apparently, is an homage to the Fantasia Upon One Note, which Townshend was to address more directly with the music and lyrics of Pure and Easy, from what is possibly Townshend’s greatest failure as well as, in many ways, his triumph, Lifehouse. Moribund for decades, the Lifehouse project spawned two wonderful albums, Who’s Next and Who Are You? Then, when Radio 3 asked him to produce a radio drama based on Lifehouse, a collaborator said that “You have to get this right. You’re the new Purcell’.“I felt so happy for Honest Pete. At least someone else got it, and didn‘t have to have it explained to him.

Yesterday was dipped in honey and spread across the week like a special treat, for it saw the return for a third series of Mark Evans’s wonderful parody of Victorian melodrama, Bleak Expectations (Radio 4, 6.30pm). This continuing story of Pip Bin, the inventor of the pedal bin, Harry Biscuit, Mr Gently Benevolent and the rest was everything we have come to love. Evans has long left behind the Dickensian templates that informed Bleak Expectations at the beginning — now, anything goes. The growth of the temperance movement means that Pip and Harry, pleasure bent, are forced to walk past alcohol-free pubs such as The Killjoy and Horses on their way to a low dive in the East End — The Jellied Eel and Murderer — that does serve strong drink.

Staggering out, they fall prey to a larcenous pigeon that steals Pip’s handkerchief, murders some poor wretch (for the bird has been inhabited by the spirit of the evil Gently Benevolent, currently in a Voldemortian not-quite-himself state) and then drops it on the corpse to incriminate Pip. Inspector Whackwallop of Scotland Yard shows up to grill our hero: “The victim had hundreds of tiny wounds and was clutching your handkerchief.“ “Ah, that’s easily explained. A pigeon stole it and must have dropped it there accidentally. Now, Inspector, you say the body had hundreds of tiny wounds.”

“Aha! I never said it had hundreds of tiny wounds.”

“Yes you did.”

“Damn. That normally works. Aha! I never said he was an apprentice blacksmith.”

“And nor did I.”

“Didn’t you? Damn again.”

And so on. Existing lovers of Bleak Expectations will already know that the inspired lunacy of previous series is intact. Newcomers will doubtless be hopelessly confused, but eager to learn more. The BBC iPlayer is but several computer strokes away. Have at it.

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