Hosted by Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Maurice Chammah, Serial’s bracing look at a life on death row is a true crime triumph. Plus, Illuminated’s moving tale of friendship

The Smiths’ connection to Salford Lads Club continues to be a financial lifeline as other landmarks of working-class life have disappeared across Britain

The Primitive Percussion Youth Orchestra helps musical children march to their own beat

The axing of specialist presenters heralds shows that all sound the sound; beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s soup offers food for thought; and Gordon Banks’s World Cup tale

The first episode of Sisters of Defiance digs into the inherited anxieties shaping British-Asian women’s lives

Kirsty Young delves into the archives of psychiatrist Anthony Clare, who for 20 years interrogated celebrity guests - from Anthony Hopkins to Jimmy Savile - live on air

On a walk through the wet fields of Buckinghamshire, the comedian and presenter talks about drinking lager aged three, his dad’s excuse for abandoning his family and why leaving Oxford University was like being thrown from a boat

Communion is a powerful and haunting debut novel about faith and belonging

The Britpop pioneers still have an infectious, age-defying energy and vulnerability

Writers will always steal from each other, but new technologies pose a threat to the value of creativity itself

How a satirical BBC broadcast convinced listeners that London was under siege

The country singer on her new album – a raging indictment of Trump’s America

Naomi Alderman returns with a second series of her witty and accessible profiles of great minds, from Karl Marx to Marie Curie

The Thin White Duke dominates the airwaves for a week of tributes, featuring interviews, ghostly archival footage and a new Labyrinth-inspired radio drama

The actor on school with the Sex Pistols and why acting was his destiny

The Closer actor on forging a path from Coventry to Hollywood, returning to the National, and the phone call of his career

The Hollow Men emerged from a dark chapter in the poet's life – 100 years on, it continues to speak to the deepest anxieties of our age

Mark Herbert on how Warp Films’s team of ‘chippy outsiders’ went global

The Better Call Saul star is taking the lead in Vince Gilligan’s latest series, Pluribus. She talks sci-fi, jigsaw puzzles and making it big in her forties

The Lemonheads frontman’s riveting memoir Rumours of My Demise reveals the reality of addiction and fame