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.

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”.

Louis Timpany was 22 and working on a building site when he had a brainwave – a radio station by, and for, tradespeople. Now with a huge listenership, Fix Radio is taking on the big beasts of the airwaves

It is cold, dark and deathly quiet at an out-of-town business park in West Sussex. Hours before the car-parts business, the furniture workshop and the trampoline park open, the only noise competing with the hum of the A27 spills out from unit 45.

“We are serving up the ultimate builders’ breakfast!” bellows a jingle playing out just after 7.30am. “The Bald Builders Breakfast … Packed with the good stuff, plenty of sauce and the two biggest clowns on site.”

Our roundup of what to watch at home includes Rambert’s prequel to the hit TV series, Jodie Comer reprising the legal drama and Roald Dahl’s The Magic Finger

A doff of the cap to Rambert’s artistic director Benoit Swan Pouffer for teaming up with Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight and the late Benjamin Zephaniah to deliver this blistering prequel to the street gang’s saga. A hit in 2022, it brought dance to a huge new audience and heads back out on tour this autumn, but a version filmed at the Hippodrome, in the gang’s home turf Birmingham, is on BBC iPlayer .

Playwright best known for his signature early works The Hamlet of Stepney Green and Enter Solly Gold

Although once bracketed with Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker , his fellow East End of London Jewish playwrights of the late 1950s, Bernard Kops, who has died aged 97, was a more fantastical, surreal writer than either. And while Pinter was always a political writer, Kops and Wesker, though committed socialists (and Kops a communist who sold copies of the Morning Star outside Whitechapel station), offered more sentimental portraits of Jewish family life in the context of local and European history.

Kops’s two early signature plays, which remain his best known – The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1957) and Enter Solly Gold (1961) – established his main themes of emotional and material escape from the humdrum life. This “improvement” is invariably an illusion as Kops celebrates the durability of love, virtue and belonging.

Frank Skinner’s new Radio 4 panel show is a winner; the Daily Mail goes below the line; Misha Glenny gives us microchips with everything; and Capital gains Radio 1 star Jordan North

One Person Found This Helpful (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Straight to the Comments! (Daily Mail) | Apple Podcasts
The Rise and Rise of the Microchip (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Capital Breakfast | Global Player

Here’s an odd coincidence: two new high-profile shows based around below-the-line comments. You know the sort of stuff: reviews of a product, disgruntled or otherwise; top-of-the-head thoughts of people who’ve skim-read an article; the sentimental rambles found under 1990s YouTube rave videos. Finally, they’re useful!

The Bafta and Oscar-nominated actor says he would like to reprise his role as the Birmingham gangster Thomas Shelby

The Oscar and Bafta-nominated Cillian Murphy, a hot contender to win best actor awards for his portrayal of Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan ’s film about the creator of the atom bomb, has revealed he would still happily return to the role of Peaky Blinders’ s Thomas Shelby, on the small or the big screen, if the chance came his way.

“If there is more story to tell, and if Stephen Knight delivers a script like I know he can, then I will be there,” Murphy said. “I mean, if we want to watch 50-year-old Tommy Shelby, I will be there. Let’s do it.”