Leader Conference, Radio 4, WednesdayThe Bird Fancyer's Delight, Radio 4, TuesdayTim Key's Suspended Sentence, Radio 4, Tuesday

As the reader said to the editor, take me to your leader

Newspaper editorial conferences are supposed to be vibrant, humming and buzzing with ideas – and though I've not attended one at Independent Towers for a while, I'm sure that's exactly what they're like.

My memory's clearly playing tricks on me when I recall editors' offices littered with people doodling furiously as they try to stay awake. I remember one desk editor, who, to be fair, had recently become a father, and so may have had a few sleepless nights, dozing in an upright position against the wall. In my days as a sports news editor, I confess I once accidentally read out the previous day's list of stories; no one noticed.

Leader conferences are different, though – the finest minds in the, er, immediate vicinity assembled to decide what the next day's leading articles – the voice of the paper – are going to say. Andrew Rawnsley's new programme, Leader Conference, assembled writers from various papers to put together an imaginary leader page, and it was a pretty good re-creation of the real thing, setting the right tone of good-humoured jousting. No surprise for guessing what they thought the top leader should be about – a certain, now closing, newspaper's dubious practices – though there seemed to be an element of partisanship when Danny Finkelstein of the Murdoch-owned Times suggested that the leader should go beyond the News of the World and focus on wider media ethics.

One of the lines they eventually took – that the BSkyB takeover should be delayed – prefigured precisely that announcement the following day. The programme is an excellent idea, demystifying the leader-writing process, and if you want a sense of what journos are like together, Rawnsley's mob are a pretty good indication.

For all the excitement provided by the phone-hacking saga, it was nice to retreat for a while into another world. In the wonderful The Bird Fancyer's Delight, the composer Sarah Angliss investigated the eponymous 18th-century manual designed to teach songbirds to whistle human music – to become living record players.

The jury was very much out on whether there was any real success – in the 1950s someone tried and failed to teach bullfinches tunes from the book – but Angliss explored some fascinating byways. The ornithologist Geoff Sample took a seven-second recording of a skylark, then played the last second of it, slowing it down by three-and-a-half times the original: immediately you could see the fabulous high-speed complexity of the bird's song. Then he played it 14 times slower – and it was like a modern-jazz masterpiece by John Coltrane.

In Tim Key's Suspended Sentence, the comedian, performance poet and aspiring novelist went in search of the perfect first line. Some of his efforts were awful – deliberately so, I suspect – but "Smoke filled the greenhouse" I liked a lot, while "Some of the things that Clement ate that summer were truly shameful" suggests he's on the right track. Only 70,000 words to go ...