BEING nice about other celebrities is not Joan Rivers' forte. A few weeks ago the Cruella de Vil of comedy used expletives to describe Russell Crowe on daytime television. It's perhaps surprising, then, that she will be hosting a biographic tribute – a format that normally depends on the presenter being humble. Still, perhaps she can squeeze some of that out if the subject is Ed Sullivan, whose show Rivers appeared on no less than 19 times.
Ed Sullivan And The Gateway To America (BBC Radio 2, Tuesday, 10.30pm) charts the career of the TV superstar whose self-named show saw many landmark performances, among them The Beatles in 1964, which apparently led to a significant
fall in crime because so many people stayed in to watch.
Jason Byrne (BBC Radio 2, Saturday, 1.30pm), like Rivers, should go down well at the Fringe this year. Before that, though, the Irish comic hosts a new series centred on a different "theme" each week. I use inverted commas because his stand-up show last year was called "Shy Pigs, With Wigs, Hidden in Twigs", and in it he mentioned none of them.
Over on Radio 4,
One Chord Wonders: Parallel Lines (Friday, 9pm), views the punk era through five plays written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, whose work includes the screenplay for 24 Hour Party People.
Worth getting up early for is
Sunday Morning With Richard Holloway (BBC Radio Scotland, today, 8am), which sees the former Bishop of Edinburgh interview some of Scotland's seminal cultural figures. First up is composer Nigel Osborne, who talks about working with children in war zones.
The full article contains 270 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
