Radio highlights of 2015: Lily Cole visits Troy and Chris Morris's On the Hour is revisited

Your guide to the best of what the wireless has to offer this year

Lily Cole stars in a radio version of Simon Armitage's The Last Days of Troy (Jonathan Keenan)

The Last Days of Troy

This dramatised version of Homer’s Illiad, courtesy of the poet and author Simon Armitage, was first directed at the Royal Exchange by Nick Bagnall and starred the model Lily Cole. Here, Cole makes her radio debut as the abducted queen and the face that launched a thousand ships.

Radio 4, 11 January, 3pm

Sunday Feature: Zola in Norwood

Michael Rosen will present this intriguing investigation into Emile Zola’s 11-month exile to the leafy suburbs of South London after a French court sentenced him to imprisonment. Rosen will examine Zola’s political concerns and literary and photographic output during his forced sojourn, and talk to his great-granddaughter, Martine.

Radio 3, 11 January, 6.45pm

It’s a Painful Business: On the Hour with Eddie Mair

Following Mary Anne Hobbes’s brilliant retrospective of Chris Morris’s radio output last year, Eddie Mair will revisit Morris’s peerless On the Hour, the early-90s satirical series that mocked the overcooked conventions of news reporting and pre-empted the rolling channels of today.

Radio 4 Extra, January

World War Is a Mickey Mouse Business

Marking the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, this eye-opening documentary will uncover Walt Disney’s contribution to the war effort. The illustrator Gerald Scarfe reveals that the animator produced a raft of military training films and propaganda shorts, and how Donald Duck was an unlikely morale booster on the Home Front.

Radio 4, Spring

Richer World Season

A season of reports, documentaries and debates on the global growth in health and wealth, and the concomitant gulf between rich and poor, will begin in February with Fridgenomics, a documentary looking at how families’ status can be measured by their ownership of a fridge.

BBC World Service, Spring