Night life

He’s got the perfect voice for radio, gruff and gravelly, slow and measured so you can catch every word. His new series is not, as you might expect, on 6 or 1, or even 2, but on 4. Jarvis Cocker’s Wireless Nights (late on Thursdays) is quite a coup for the former Home Service, the Pulp frontman bringing a touch of street cred to the network once proud to be considered middle-of-the-road.

Cocker promises that his series will wander through aspects of the night, drawing on the stories of those who stay awake through the witching hours. Tilly, a young shepherdess, is facing her first night shift alone, struggling to keep alive a ewe who is giving birth to twins. The legs of both lambs are out but their heads are stuck. The chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge talks about his work as a ‘deliverance minister’, called out at night by families in great fear of something they’re not sure of. He says a prayer, or two, reciting the words from Compline — ‘Visit this place, O Lord, we pray, and drive far from it the snares of the enemy.’ The pilot of a Boeing 747, on an overnight flight from Las Vegas to Gatwick, recalls his boyhood, catching the bus to Heathrow with a pack of sandwiches and a Thermos of tea and spending the day camped out on the Perimeter Road watching the planes coming in to land. ‘That’s me now,’ he tells Cocker, proudly.

It should have been my kind of radio — snatches of other people’s lives told straight to mike and woven together in such a way as to draw out surprising insights, intriguing connections. But instead it was irritating, Cocker’s digressions only occasionally striking a chord.