The Ashes on the radio, the only place to follow this summer’s cricket

No sport is more perfectly attuned to the nuances of radio broadcasting than cricket. There is no sporting event to equal the Ashes when it comes to testing the intestinal fortitude of the English, and there is no better team than the one assembled by Test Match Special – Agnew, Vaughan, Tufnell, Swann, Boycott, Smith, Blofeld, Mann, even visiting commentator Jim Maxwell – when it comes to holding the nation’s hand in this particular hour of need. It’s sad, however, that there’s no place for Alison Mitchell, who was so good during the last series against New Zealand, which incidentally was conducted with exemplary sportsmanship by both sides.

The first sure thing about The Ashes (from Wednesday, 10am, Radio 4 LW and Radio 5 Live Sports Extra) is that it won’t be like that. The second sure thing is that otherwise sane, responsible grown-ups will be curled in foetal balls in the corners of sofas up and down the land as they marvel once more at the delicious torture that is live cricket. We all have our idea of the one thing that justifies the licence fee. TMS is mine. It was brought home to me once again during the New Zealand series when I unexpectedly found myself watching the same games on TV. They were OK but they were nothing like as real as they were on Test Match Special.

Much as I love Radio 4 it has certain habits that make it an easy target for parody. John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme (Wednesday, 11.30am, Radio 4) isolated a recurring foible in the network’s makeup recently in a sketch called “saying the plot out loud”, which is further billed as “how the Afternoon Drama sounds to people who do not listen to the Afternoon Drama”. Lines such as “Don’t answer the phone. We’re having an affair. That would be ridiculous” and “If you’ve been affected by any of the issues in the play, then God knows you’ve had them painstakingly clarified for you now” made me laugh out loud. It’s on the BBC website and is worth four minutes of anybody’s time.

In Archive On 4: Tomorrow’s World, Today (Saturday, 8pm, Radio 4) one of the erstwhile faces of the show, James Burke, looks at what its archives can teach us about predicting the future. It’s all here: Raymond Baxter coaxing Concorde into the air, Judith Hann pioneering the revolutionary concept of a woman talking about science, and Maggie Philbin remembering when people hadn’t entirely agreed how to pronounce Chernobyl. Of course, the future isn’t what it was back in the 70s and 80s. Since the digital revolution we have swapped our interest in the future for a fascination with the fun-packed present. As each new change sweeps through, it seems to expunge all traces of the world that existed before we took the change for granted.

Tomorrow’s World was never at its best when predicting the sheer amount of foolishness that was bound to accompany the future. The man who invented the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, said the only thing that surprised him about the development of the internet was that it involved so many cats. In Pussy Galore (Saturday, 10.30am, Radio 4) Susan Calman indulges herself on the subject of the key role played by felines in the development of the internet. Here we touch on the stories of Grumpy Cat, Lil Buu and My Sad Cat. Here we delve into the strange world of online feline agents. We learn that the fuel of the internet is the urge to share; and there is something about a picture of a cat that clearly aches to be forwarded.