Unsound bites

Alma Cogan once wore a dress decorated with 12,964 diamante beads. What a pity that a life so associated with the glimmer of sequins and the shimmer of stardom ended up in a courtroom tussle, brought about by embittered relatives claiming misrepresentation of Cogan. The programme in question was Stage Mother, Sequinned Daughter (Radio 4), a series of fleeting glimpses of Cogan from promising, shy young singer, through 50s stardom and 60s career dip, to a premature death from cancer in her mid-30s. Cogan's sister wanted the series to be pulled, describing it as a travesty of the facts that "dances on [Alma's] grave".

Due to the last-minute legal wrangles, these vignettes were transformed from simply telling a life in bite-sized chunks, into programmes that raised the issue of responsibility in biography, however slight in scope the enterprise. There was much to admire in Jessica Martin's warm portrayal of Cogan, especially as sadness crept into her days with the waning of her success, but I couldn't help wondering why certain facts had been ignored, and others tampered with.

However impressionistic the series deliberately set out to be, the erasure of Cogan's sister from the considerable scrutiny of her family it contained, seemed an odd decision. And if it's true, as was claimed in court, that Cogan's mother was born in London and had an English accent, then Alison Steadman's astringent "vee have vays" German accent was an unnecessary, distracting embellishment. These niggling doubts about the veracity of what we were hearing undermined a potentially compelling life story that, without any meddling, already had enough dramatic truth about it. (There were, though, some great lines. "Get Alma to tell you my joke about the dogs," is how Cogan's mother enthusiastically greets Ava Gardner as the two stars prepare to fly out to New York: a gem of parental embarrassment.)

"I haven't had a record played on the radio here in years," Dolly Parton noted to Nick Barraclough (Radio 2) just after he'd played several tracks from her audacious new album Halos and Horns. Its theme is how "most of us are too good to be really bad and too bad to be really good"; rather like Dolly's latest songs in fact. She braves a bluegrass cover of Stairway to Heaven (no, really), and croons If - some of you will be unlucky enough to recall Kojak taking this to the top of the charts - to a manic country backing-track that sounds like Benny Hill's women-chasing music.

"They can kiss my ass now," said Parton, pluckily, of the music industry that forced her to stick to three-minute songs for years. "It doesn't matter if they're five minutes long, or six, or seven." Good Dolly, it does.