POPULAR entertainment was under the microscope this week. Now You’re Asking (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week), co-hosted by the novelist Marian Keyes, whose books have sold 35 million copies, returned with an opening episode from the Hay Festival. Since 2022, Roman Catholic-raised Keyes and the actress Tara Flynn have dispensed off-the-wall wisdom to problems sent by “Askers”. But moving from studio intimacy to a huge literary festival broke the spell of us as silent partners in a conversation between two witty friends.

Rather than integrate responses to Askers’ conundrums into their convivial chat, Keyes and Flynn sounded scripted, as if problems had been designed as punchline set-ups. A woman bullied at school for creativity, including having a blade pointed at her ear with the threat “Van Gogh”, led to Keyes’s struggling to pronounce “Van Go, Van Goff, Van Gee”, and then Flynn’s recalling a man in her home town who had had his work vehicle stolen, and was known as “Vincent van gone”. A great line, but coincidental?

The core of Keyes’s and Flynn’s advice remains golden. For the wedding photographer contemplating revenge, they counselled that engaging, as an adult, with the tormentor would only retraumatise her, however appealing payback might feel. A relocated woman, deluged with neighbourly invitations, was advised to offer her life story on laminated sheets, inviting neighbours home, to sate local curiosity.

Celebrated as one of the greatest composers of his era, Henry Purcell staked his claim to fame early on. A chorister in the Chapel Royal at the age of eight, by 14 he had become assistant instrument-keeper, and then, in 1681, organist at Westminster Abbey, earning £10 a year, with £8 for accommodation, in his early twenties. In Composer of the Week: Purcell (Radio 3, Tuesday of last week), Donald Macleod filled the air with melodic alleluias, as he outlined the relationship of Purcell, the Londoner, with the capital’s churches.

Purcell probably composed Beati omnes qui timent Dominum (“Blessed are those who fear the Lord”), with its multiple alleluias, for his own wedding to Frances Peters, a Roman Catholic. They had six children, but only two survived infancy. Purcell’s Te Deum and Jubilate was the first orchestral setting by an English composer, and debuted in 1684 at a St Cecilia’s Day festival in St Bride’s, one of the first post-Great Fire churches to be reopened.

Contemporary male American novelists, their heroes powering through life’s road trip fuelled by coffee, hard liquor, and endless affairs, used to dominate literary bestseller lists until the 2000s. Then, their star waned, as their granite prose became so last millennium. But the EastEnders creator John Yorke’s championing of Richard Ford’s novel The Lay of the Land, in Opening Lines (Radio 4, Sunday), suggested that reappraisal might be at hand. Offering the pleasure of being “suffused by language”, the novel asks: “Are you ready to meet your Maker?”