IT MAY be a platitude to observe how contemporary media both pander to and entrain the ever shortening attention span of their consumers. Yet it is still surprising to encounter examples. Take the interviewing style of Sir David Frost, which, in The Frost Tapes (Radio 4, Monday), we may admire again, thanks to the devoted curation of his son, Wilfred Frost. What strikes one now about the Frost technique is his measured and patient delivery. Compared with the celebrity interviews of today, his seem almost impossibly languid.

Last week’s episode featured extracts from Sir David’s encounters with Elizabeth Taylor, including her first big television interview, from 1970: an unplanned appearance that came about on the insistence of the scheduled star, Richard Burton. The couple’s playfulness on this occasion is enchanting, even when counterpointed with the knowledge of their can’t-live-with-but-can’t-live-without affairs.

But the best material in this programme relates to Taylor’s career at MGM, and her relationship with the studio boss, Louis B. Meyer. A star is not born, Meyer is alleged to have scoffed, but is carefully and cold-bloodedly built up from nothing. Many decades before #MeToo, Taylor was telling Meyer to “go to hell” — although the star of her most delicious anecdote is not her, but the singer Perry Como, who had the audacity to give Meyer the finger during a rendition of “Happy birthday”.

Fast forward half a century, and celebrities who have made their names on the back of reality TV shows get far less time to promote their third autobiography. If you want a reminder of how this all started, then you may wish to endure Unreal: A critical history of reality TV (Radio 4, weekdays of last week; full series available on BBC Sounds). This account is delivered by two media journalists, Pandora Sykes and Sirin Kale, who are evidently immersed in the genre; so, if you like your cultural theory delivered by somebody with the gravitas of a Michael Ignatieff, then this is not for you.

But they are suitably censorious when it comes to the most egregious examples of exploitation. The segment in which the producer of There’s Something About Miriam attempts to defend the deception involved in his dating-show-with-a-twist is a sordid example of how abject the self-justification of the reality TV executive can be.

In a more wholesome vein, Assignment (World Service, Thursday of last week) brought us the story of lacrosse, and, in particular, the efforts by Native American communities to reclaim the sport from its elitist reputation. The “Creator’s game” is an ancient activity that long pre-dates the period when French-speaking colonists, observing the resemblance between the wooden stick and a bishop’s staff, named it after the crosier: “la crosse”. Lacrosse games in the less regulated “original” form are now occasions for the celebration of indigenous culture. “Indigenous lacrosse is going to save the world,” one exuberant advocate declared.