Next week’s radio: from Poetry Please to Digitising Stalin

David Hepworth on WB Yeats’s offspring, kooky BBC rivals, 60s easy listening and Tupac Shakur’s life lessons

WB Yeats
WB Yeats. Photograph: Corbis

A valuable corrective to our tendency to venerate high-achievers is to talk to their children. There are two striking examples of that this week. Poetry Please (Sunday, 4.30pm, R4), a programme that still uses the word “mailbag” in a way that smacks of Ovaltine, is a WB Yeats special this week, marking 75 years since his death. Between the readings, the best of which is Stephen Rea giving The Second Coming, there are archive recordings of scholars and contemporaries. According to Yeats’s daughter: “He was always away in his head. He’s gone past me in the street.”

The second offspring is the son of Captain Leonard Plugge, the subject of The Eccentric Entrepreneur (Saturday, 8pm, R4). When Reith was setting up the BBC in Portland Place, Plugge, who was Belgian and hence it was strictly “Plooj”, was in an office around the corner at the helm of the International Broadcasting Corporation, only too happy to be mistaken for its more respectable neighbour. IBC broadcast from a transmitter in Normandy and was supported entirely by adverts for face cream. It was a huge success because it hit upon the idea of playing the dance band records that people wanted to hear rather than the Bible stories that Reith thought they ought to hear. Plugge made millions out of it and rubbed shoulders with royalty and movie stars, where the fact that he was both a cad and a bounder didn’t seem to be a problem. It’s a compelling story, much of it told with the help of a son who remembers a father so engrossed in his empire that he had no time for family. Was it fun being his son? “No. We had a bomb in the garage once that destroyed six of his cars.”

That programme features a couple of rich, tweedy voices from radio’s past in the shape of Radio Normandy announcers Roy Plomley and Bob Danvers-Walker. To hear them conversing normally is as worrying as catching the Queen finishing a sentence with “Ya get me?” Another voice, which reaches back almost to the same era, is still broadcasting on Radio 2 every week. What’s more, Brian Matthew’s Sound Of The 60s (Saturday, 8am, R2) always finds a special place in its heart for the music that was never quite edgy enough for the classic rock magazines, and you would have thought had been forgotten by everyone but the copyright owners. Not so. At this point on the dial, the Koobas, the Womenfolk, Terry Stafford and Los Pop Tops still count for something.

In Tupac Shakur, Hip-Hop Immortal (Thursday, 11.30am, R4), poet Al Letson is caught between gushing about the late rapper, who would only have got on Radio 4 at the far end of an arts reviewer’s forceps in the days when he was alive, and reassuring the audience that he doesn’t approve of some of the things Shakur embraced. There’s nothing particularly new about this. Some of the sentiments being voiced in those old blues sung by cheery Louis Armstrong would have Woman’s Hour in conniptions if we listened closely.

I was unable to hear The Lessons Of Ray Honeyford (Monday, 11am, R4), about the Bradford headmaster who found himself in the headlines in 1984 because his views on multiculturalism weren’t the same as the educational establishment, or Digitising Stalin (Monday, 8pm, R4), Daniel Kalder’s investigation of the project between the Russian State Archive and Yale, which encompasses the years 1890 to 1952, but they seem timely.