Nicholas Parsons; the inheritance tracks of Steve Earle

Just shy of ninety Nicholas Parsons is the chair of the long running Radio 4 favourite Just A Minute. He talks to Richard and Anita about his many years in show business after a start in engineering! His latest venture is a junior version of Just A Minute.

Listen to Just A Minute.

American singer-songwriter Steve Earle inherits ‘Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pandowdy’ by Ella Fitzgerald and passes on ‘I am a patriot’ by Little Steven.

Listen to a Steve Earle Special on The Strand.

Bradley Garrett is a place hacker or urban explorer accessing tunnels or high buildings and the out-of-bounds parts of cities all over the world.

Jill Hughes is an apprentice pipe fabricator and fitter with Ferguson Shipbuilders Ltd on the River Clyde in Glasgow. This is one of the hybrid passenger/vehicle ferries she helped to build.

More on Ferguson Shipbuilders Ltd.

12 year old Zrey Sholapurkar tells us what it was like to sit alongside Nicholas Parsons and take to the mic in Junior Just a Minute.

Junior Just a Minute kicks off on 11th Nov on the 4 O'Clock Show on BBC Four Extra.

The Algha Works Factory in London’s East End has been producing little gold round spectacle frames, once NHS standard issue, since 1932. Though it has supplied everyone from John Lennon to Harry Potter over the years, the factory remains almost unchanged to this day.

More on Algha Works from the BBC.

In the orchard the trees were hanging heavy with fruit, or were until a plague of more than usually resolute wasps found them, and it made me think of traditional Harvest Festivals, of sheaves of golden corn, and great baskets of what we now call ‘heritage’ apples, and of the loaf baked by the wife of the first farmer to get the harvest in. An ancient custom? Actually, no. It dates back only to the nineteenth century in the form we celebrate it throughout the Church of England, and was really invented by the very eccentric Vicar of Morwenstow in Cornwall, Parson Hawker. I’m writing this in the sitting room of a cottage he once lived in, deep in the dripping and storm-tossed Coombe Valley near Bude. Here, when he was twenty, he brought his forty one year old bride, and you could too, for it is available to rent, and very nice, with slate floors and huge oak beams and a thatched roof. Hawker famously built a shed on the cliff tops overlooking the Atlantic, from where he would watch ships wreck on the rocks below, and muster parties of parishioners to ensure the dead got buried rather than looted, as was the custom around those parts according to dark legend. We visited that too and I’m glad to say saw no wrecks, though we did have a little disaster of our own. On the first night of our holiday my partner woke up one and sleepily pitched headlong down the stairs, dislocating his shoulder and spectacularly fracturing his humerus. So we spent most of our week off in the little cottage hospital at Bude and Barnstaple District Hospital where he was strapped up and dosed with painkillers. These came in handy when we went on a little walk round that orchard and a wasp, dislodged from its Bramley, flew down his shirt and then contrived to sting him thrice before I could get his sling off, very delicately but in understandable haste. Ow, ow…..ow.

He’s getting plated and pinned at the moment so allow me meanwhile to alert you to Saturday’s line up. Our studio guest is Nicholas Parsons, who makes ninety look like the new sixty. We meet too a woman who traced her GI grandfather back to America, and another who is the only female pipe fitter on the Clyde’s last independent shipyard. All these plus the Inheritance Tracks of Steve Earle and an excursion place-hacking with a urban explorer don.