Anton Lesser

Here's a play about the friendship that grew between the two lead actors in Dad's Army, John Le Mesurier (played by Anton Lesser) and Arthur Lowe (Robert Daws), which began on the TV series and lasted all their lives. Playwright Roy Smiles switches between the letters the pair exchanged in the 1980s, remembering how they got to know each other making the show, and afterwards, showing why such different people remained such pals. Maybe part of it was the integrity of the David Croft and Jimmy Perry scripts which, 40 years on, still shine.

Last week Radio 4's Afternoon Play was full of such temptation. In Gary Brown's comedy Prospero, Ariel, Reith and Gill (Wednesday), John Reith, the BBC's first director general (played by Tim McInnerny) faced up to his inner sexual demons, as did the sculptor Eric Gill (Anton Lesser), finishing off his famous Prospero and Ariel statue over the doorway to Broadcasting House. Because it was full of obvious signals (funny voices from Jon Glover, comic whizzing noises) we were clearly warned not to take it literally. Yet there seemed an earnest hankering, in the confessional bits, to show us the author's solemn side too. Mistake.

Tim McInnerny was an acerbic Sir John Reith with a truly scary bag of repressed desires in Gary Brown's hilariously over-the-top account of the making of the Broadcasting House sculptures in Prospero, Ariel, Reith and Gill. No one more likes to poke fun at Aunty's first director-general than the BBC itself, especially to synchronise with the Reith Lectures, and Anton Lesser as the lascivious sculptor Eric Gill was in full-blown connivance.

To the Discworld for Mort (11pm, Radio 4), a four-part adaptation of Terry Pratchett's novel. An unemployable lad is taken on as the Grim Reaper's apprentice and soon finds that ushering souls into the next world is not all it's cracked up to be. Carl Prekopp plays our boy Mort, Geoffrey Whitehead is Death and Anton Lesser narrates.