David Hepworth

The return of Miles Jupp's gently stinging chronicle of the career of minor cookery writer Damien Trench. In this episode, his programme Poets And Their Palates has been nominated for a Melvyn. Or Best Factual Programming Within A Historical Context For A Digital Station, to be exact. He's thrilled, of course, but he has to pretend that he isn't, which is the true mark of the media tribe. Radio 4 does this kind of Islington navel-gazing very well, as sitcom Ed Reardon's Week has already proved.

Dave Podmore, who first came before the public in the pages of this newspaper, is a comic creation for our times, which are increasingly brought to us courtesy of a sponsor. The core truth of the Podmore project is that first-class cricketers feel entitled to the same rewards as top footballers. Since they don't get them they make up the difference in VAT scams and having their names written on the side of their free cars. This can earn them seven-and-a-half grand, apparently. That's what the titular oaf of Dave Podmore's Ashes Shame (Sun, 7.15pm, R4) tells the actor playing young England star Joe Root, when he can tear him away from his Scalextric.

As a player, Dave never scaled the heights that Root is already acquainted with, and of late he has known hard times. He lost his prestigious post as Twitter coach to the England women's team, his Rhodesian ridgeback Saxon has been shot by the police for killing foxes, and even his lovely wife Jackie has temporarily deserted him to set up a vajazzle franchise in the Emirates. Nevertheless, Dave's buoyancy remains breathtaking, particularly so when placed at the service of his awesome ignorance. There is no sum of money too small for him to discuss. "If it hasn't got Helen Mirren's face on it, it's not legal tender," he warns. This episode has been re-edited since I heard it, to take account of Julia Gillard's stepping down from Australia's highest office. Come the Ashes, Pod will no doubt be knocking out cassettes of the original in the beer tent at Trent Bridge.

Mark Thomas originally devised Bravo Figaro (Monday, 11pm, Radio 4) for the Deloitte Ignite series at the Royal Opera House. It's an hour-long performance devoted to the story of his father Colin, an opera-loving builder. We are so prone to stereotyping people and their musical tastes that the idea of an opera-loving builder is far more surprising today than it might have been in the past. More important to the story is Thomas's description of his father as "a word that cannot be used on Radio 4".

The temptation is to say Colin "was" all the above but he's still alive, albeit severely handicapped by progressive supranuclear palsy. Thomas makes it clear that, because of his father's history of domestic violence and the lack of warmth between them, "this is not a story about forgiveness and redemption". It nonetheless culminates in his well-connected comedian son bringing professional opera singers to perform in Colin's retirement bungalow in the course of taking, as he freely admits, a very sad situation and making a piece of entertainment out of it.

Thomas has the hard-breathing attack a monologist requires and varies his line and length enough to keep you listening. What's interesting about the programme as radio is the way his sleeve-tugging delivery is regularly interrupted by lo-fi recorded interjections from his father, mother and members of his family, pulling him from the brink of grand gestures that hit the dress circle, back under the low ceiling of life.

John Osborne, who previously brought us John Peel's Shed, explains what happened when he decided to pursue the shopportunities arrayed in The Newsagent's Window (Sunday, 7.15pm, R4). How it led him to acquire the entire VHS collection of a man who'd just discovered DVD, to an innocent session with a masseuse who looked at his back and offered useful life advice, plus an encounter with a vicar in Bungay "who used words like shenanigans, higgledy-piggledy and kerfuffle". The studio audience is big enough to laugh when called for and small enough to keep quiet when it's not. Osborne quietly makes a point about the nerve and generosity it takes to seek contact in the real world rather than the digital one, and the production has a dream-like air which makes it an ideal companion for those fending off the existential melancholy that is the Sunday evening ironer's lot.

Ian D Montfort Is: Unbelievable (Thursday, 9.30pm, R2) continues radio's long-running affair with illusion, a world in which you'd think it would have no business. Montfort calls himself a "celebrity spirit medium". He also calls himself "Britain's first spokesman for the pseudo sciences", which deliberately implies that the BBC management has "complied" his act within an inch of its life. "The production team have not altered the sense of what was experienced by the live audience in any way," promises an opening voiceover. When he's funny it doesn't really matter whether you believe him.