The character comic on gigging with chickens, harnessing the power of embarrassment and her spoof Radio 4 current affairs show

What first drew you to character comedy?
As a kid I loved television, especially whatever my parents watched. Dad liked the anarchic 80s stuff like The Young Ones . Mum liked the 90s situational stuff like The Vicar of Dibley and The Royle Family . My taste was an amalgamation of theirs, plus The Simpsons. For a weird kid, it was glorious to see huge, strange characters being laughed at and celebrated for their stupidity, eccentricity and energy. When I started gigging, it was a no-brainer to do character comedy. Standups create a persona anyway, so I thought: why not make a persona who is much more fun to play than me?

How did you get into comedy?
For ages, wanting to do comedy was a secret I was too scared to admit. As a teen I came up with the most roundabout ways that I could to end up “accidentally” doing comedy. One plan was to get a job presenting BBC Breakfast with Charlie and Susanna. Then the BBC would ask me on Let’s Dance for Sport Relief. I’d say, “Ohh scary hehehe,” and I’d end up being hilarious and everyone would laugh at me. Eventually a confident pal took me to a workshop run by a university improv troupe, who ended up scouting me for their show. Officially funny and cool people telling me I was funny was the boost I needed to admit I wanted to try it properly.

Lorna Rose Treen: Skin Pigeon is at Soho theatre, London , 3-6 July. Time of the Week will air on BBC Radio 4 in the spring

Readers respond to Nell Frizzell’s article on pop music being played as she waited for a medical appointment

If you think listening to Carly Rae Jepsen in a hospital waiting room is bad ( Sweating with fear, I waited to hear the doctor’s verdict. Then the radio started playing Call Me Maybe …, 13 March ), try being wheeled in for an abortion to the sound of – I kid you not – Barry White. A moment so surreal that I often think I must have imagined it. But I know it happened because it was before they gave me the drugs. Everything went smoothly, as you can imagine.
Name and address supplied

• Eight years ago in Fairbanks, Alaska, I was about to go under to have a cataract removed. I was asked what music I’d like. The Buena Vista Social Club , I replied. Less than 60 seconds later, I drifted off to those warm notes before I had time to be surprised that first, the specialist knew of it, and second, that they had it to hand. I like to think my improved eyesight owes a little to that relaxing music.
Flora Grabowska
Crovie, Aberdeenshire

The pop star turned vicar and radio host on his new career as crime novelist, missing the clergy and why his books speak to the anxiety of uncertain times

After being a pop star in his 20s (as keyboard player in the Communards with Jimmy Somerville), Richard Coles became an Anglican vicar and then a broadcaster (notably as a co-presenter for 12 years on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live ). The 61-year-old is now a bestselling novelist: his second “cosy crime” book, A Death in the Parish , featuring the country vicar and occasional sleuth Canon Daniel Clement, is out now in paperback; a third mystery follows this summer. He lives in East Sussex with his two dachshunds Pongo and Daisy.

You have just completed a seven-month nationwide tour called Borderline National Trinket . It looked like an exhausting schedule...
It’s been quite a do. The last time I toured I was in my 20s, and hotel breakfasts and midnight kebabs in your 20s are not so injurious to your health and wellbeing as they are in your 60s. So you’ve got to work out a way of doing it. But the shows were great.

Joanne McNally has fun with a pop-world conspiracy theory; Gabby Logan and Mark Chapman show their tougher sides; plus, an uplifting hunt for a shipwreck

Who Replaced Avril Lavigne? Joanne McNally Investigates (BBC Radio 5 Live) | BBC Sounds
The Sports Agents | Global
The Documentary: Diving With A Purpose (BBC World Service) | BBC Sounds

Who Replaced Avril Lavigne is an airy, almost weightless new podcast from BBC Sounds. In it, jovial comedian Joanne McNally is given the assignment of “investigating” the several-years-old conspiracy theory that Canadian pop-punk princess Avril Lavigne is not actually Avril at all any more, but someone else called Melissa Vandella. Before we get into it, let me give you a huge spoiler. Avril Lavigne is fine. She has not been replaced. I know! Worrashocker.

Pop stars, politicians, princes all seem to have the same job these days – podcast interviewer. But while these pods are great for brand-building and soft power, are they damaging the industry at large?

Things have come a long way since the 2004 Guardian article credited with coining the term “podcast”. That piece describes a new format that combines “the intimacy of voice, the interactivity of a weblog, and the convenience and portability of an MP3 download”, before speculating somewhat breathlessly that “one might soon be able to make a living doing this”.

Twenty years later, the hosts of the SmartLess podcast, actors Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett, just signed a $100m dollar deal with American radio network Sirius XM to host the podcast on the network for three years. Joe Rogan just renewed a deal with Spotify for an estimated $250m to host his podcast on its platform. The biggest tech companies in the world – Amazon, Spotify, Apple – are desperate to have a library of hit podcasts and are willing to stump up for anything that seems like a proven winner.

Woman’s Hour presenter will replace Martha Kearney as member of morning show’s team from May

Emma Barnett, the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, will join the Today programme from May.

Barnett, who had been tipped for the role with the BBC’s flagship morning radio show after Martha Kearney announced last month she was to step down, said she was “delighted to be joining a programme that occupies such a unique space in British life”.

Beth Rigby, Jess Phillips and Ruth Davidson talk politics; the Guardian’s Michael Safi explores AI’s beauty and horror. Plus, two great music programmes – one in Irish

Electoral Dysfunction | Sky New s
Black Box | The Guardian
The Price of Music | Dap Dip
An Taobh Tuathail | RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta

Another column, another new “big names chit-chat on about politics” podcast to review. Just in time (perhaps) for a general election, please welcome Electoral Dysfunction . Think The Rest Is Politics or Political Currency , but with three women who actively work in news and politics, as opposed to two men who used to.

Violent gangs! Attacks by American XL bullies! Posh boy Harry caught by cops having a drunken slash! This rural radio show is humdrum no more

Sometimes The Archers is as ordinary, and reassuringly humdrum, as the tall nettles growing over the rusty plough in Edward Thomas’s poem – the very poem, in fact, that Emma Grundy studied in her literature class.

Not this month. A lot has happened. Jolene, the landlady of the Bull, is being threatened by the leader of a violent gang from the Black Country (which might as well be the hellmouth as far as Ambridge is concerned), after an American XL bully dog in the gang’s possession attacked her husband, Kenton, in the pub car park. Kenton, on crutches, discharged himself early and has been staying in the mysterious accessible B&B room at the Snells’ that has never been mentioned before. Alistair the vet is definitely in love with Denise the veterinary nurse, and has even told Jazzer about it. That’s all very well except for the fact that she is married to someone else. (Though: “separate lives.”) There’s also the small matter that her son Paul is a veterinary nurse at the same practice, and seems blithely unaware of, or in denial about, the state of his parents’ marriage. Even the fate of Hilda, Peggy Woolley’s former feline companion, seemed uncertain this month. Having infiltrated herself into the Bridge Farm dairy, causing a health and safety crisis, it was touch and go whether someone might actually wring her neck – or at least put her into the dock in some modern version of a medieval animal trial . Less cat, more demon in feline form, as Tony Archer said.

Kavita Puri’s superb account of the 1943 Bengal famine needs to be heard; Alexi Mostrous chills with an investigation into social media hate; and the ‘madly articulate’ David Baddiel and Sayeeda Warsi tackle politics head-on

Three Million (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Who Trolled Amber? | Tortoise Media
Who We Are Now | Global Player
A Muslim & a Jew Go There (Instinct Productions) | Apple Podcasts

Three Million , from Radio 4, is about the death of 3 million people. They died long ago, in 1943, during the second world war, but they weren’t lost in battle. They died of starvation in Bengal. I knew nothing about this, and from the start, Three Million’s presenter, Kavita Puri , careful and dogged, makes it clear that the Bengal famine is rarely discussed. Three million people died, but “there’s no memorial to them”, she says, “there’s no plaque”.