RADIO / Mr Smith goes to Germany

IN A WEEK in which radio weighed up the meaning of Beowulf, the role of the UN and the career of Leonard Bernstein, nothing rang quite as true as this Cockney reminiscence: 'If you were given the chance of a cheese roll or any woman you liked, you'd take the cheese roll.'

In My Dad Was in Colditz (R5), Arthur Smith ferried his father, Syd, round an old haunt, and doughty witticisms like the above gave you a measure of the man. Smith Jnr is meant to do the stand-up stuff but he dutifully gave the floor to his father, who deadpanned his way round one of the darker cubby-holes of the Continent's recent past. At another POW castle they stood in a whispering gallery and dad whispered to son, 'I'll take a picture of you whispering,' so we listened to the inaudible sound of someone taking a picture of something invisible. Delightfully daft.

The soundtrack quoted the old BBC drama, but the programme was more in tune with the board- game. As Syd tried to find his old living quarters, it was as if he were throwing the dice to break into his own past, but the wrong number kept on coming up and the room eluded him. He didn't seem to mind. They sniggered together about the Germans confiscating the legs of the escape- minded Douglas Bader, and it was clear the Smiths weren't searching after any souls. This was cheese roll radio of the best kind: a tasty snack, just the thing to tide you over between the haute cuisine elsewhere on the menu.

Syd could have been listening to the first part of The Age of Innocence (R4), Edith Wharton's tale of snobbery and snubbery, by the end of which Newland has got engaged to May, New York's brightest belle. For all her charms, it looks at this stage like he too might go for the cheese roll. Listening to all those pillars of society playing ethical snakes- and-ladders you knew how he felt: I court you, she jilts him, we cut them . . . A good cast trotted out the polite Yankee accents well enough, but the lack of narrative between the natter left them high and dry, like skaters pirouetting on thin air.

Connected through their reliance on words, radio should be fiction's best friend, and so it proved in Christopher Priest's The Glamour (R4), in which two of the three sides in a love triangle are intermittently invisible. Try putting that on telly. Niall (Linus Roache) and Susan (Tilly Vosburgh) have 'the glamour', the ability to disappear. She turns to Richard (Nathaniel Parker) for a normal life, but he gets crippled by a bomb, starts seeing things and suddenly no one knows what's real. With copious allusions to seeing and believing, and to an unseen underclass, this could have been a religious allegory, or political, or both. Mostly, it could have been tiresome and self-regarding, but the cast, spurred by Janet Whitaker's direction, ensured otherwise.

Berlie Doherty's Dear Nobody (R5) was a gem of an altogether homelier hue. It told of a teenage couple who put a spanner in the works of their own young lives by conceiving. Kate Hardie played Helen, who wrote letters to the being within her, with charm, conviction and a lilting Yorkshire accent. As her boyfriend's father, Jack Shepherd reminded us that no one does decent, disappointed middle-aged males better.