BBC Radio’s week of Bowie

Generally, winter requires some auditory cosiness, which The Archers’ all-day 75th anniversary celebrations provided on 1 January, replicating the effects of programming around the centenary of the Shipping Forecast on New Year’s Day in 2024. The station’s pre-Christmas Jane Austen-fest, marking the author’s 250th birthday on 16 December, also felt like a festive treat (do dig it out on BBC Sounds: Emma Thompson talking about her first edition of Sense and Sensibility on Bookclub was particularly gorgeous).

The 6 Music equivalent of this is David Bowie Forever, a week-long barrage of content marking 10 years since the musician’s death. That sudden news in January 2016, two days after the release of his final album, Blackstar, prompted some of the best radio I’ve ever heard; a spontaneous swirl of stories arriving at the station from listeners, managed ably by morning DJs Shaun Keaveny and Lauren Laverne – a wake evolving in real time. This year, a full Friday of interesting interviews (airing on 9 January, after my deadline) features moreish-sounding treats such as Neil Tennant on Bowie’s impact on queer culture and Henry Rollins on Bowie’s collaborators, while next Sunday there’s a repeat of a 2019 Iggy Pop show about Berlin, where the US musician was Bowie’s flatmate in the mid-1970s (pictured together above), and Mary Anne Hobbs exploring Bowie’s 1977 album Low.

A few new interesting commissions elsewhere also broaden the Bowie vista. One is Paul Magrs’s Radio 4 play The Goblin King and Me, in which the real-life tale of a boy who wins a competition to meet Bowie around the launch of his 1986 film Labyrinth is turned into a fantastical drama. The tone echoes that old-fashioned, strangely twisty coming-of-age movie beautifully. Veteran actors Susan Jameson and James Bolam play the boy’s grandparents and Dead Ringers’s Jon Culshaw plays the Dame.

Then there’s Memo for Radio Show, which turns a scribbled list of Bowie’s 15 favourite songs, recently found in the Victoria and Albert Museum archives, into a bewitching hour. Clips of audio archive from elsewhere give the impression of Bowie “playing” these songs (such as Edgar Froese’s Epsilon in Malaysian Pale and Sonic Youth’s 1986 track Tom Violence) then musing on them, with a tone of playful ghostliness.

“I’m sorry that so many of these are so sad,” he says after Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. “It’s the weather, you know ... it’s either that, or these shoes.”

Photograph by Larry Busacca/WireImage