AS A means of framing a story, the chance encounter has a distinguished pedigree. On the way to a wedding, you bump into an ancient mariner and come away with a wild and fantastical story of sin and redemption. Radio producers love this kind of thing, not least because it means that they don’t have to create the story themselves. Surf the internet for a lonely soul with whom to converse; or pick a postcode and visit it for local gossip. These and many more variants of the chance-encounter genre have enjoyed airtime over the years.

Whether you wish to listen depends to a large extent on the sensitivity of the interviewer. Strangers on a Bench (a podcast from Acast, released Thursdays) benefits from the charmed presence of the musician Tom Rosenthal, whose voice — carrying with it the faintest whisper of a childhood lisp — is gentle and yet engaging, naïve and yet knowing. It is no wonder people want to talk to him, as he wanders the parks of London, looking for interesting characters. One wonders how many tell him to hoof off (or words to that effect). Punctuated by snippets of music and lightly adorned by the ambient sounds of summer, the show has something of the vibe of television’s Detectorists (TV, 6 January 2023).

Last week’s episode was my second encounter with the show; and you might prefer not to start with this one. For the problem with vox pop, even of this highly confected kind, is that the pop can sometimes turn out to be disagreeable company. On this occasion, our stranger (we never catch his name) starts off in the ancient-mariner vein, a traveller, a dreamer, imbued with the wisdom of ages. But there is a fine line between that and being an old bore, as there is also between behaviour that is exotic and romantic and the merely degenerate. “I am not ashamed,” declared the traveller from antique lands. “You have no reason to be,” was Rosenthal’s kindly response, imparting the redemption granted to all who confess to a broadcaster’s microphone.

It seems, too, as if none of the characters featured in Phil Hebblethwaite’s series for The Essay (Radio 3, weekdays) felt any particular sense of shame. These were all musicians who had perpetrated some form of musical fraud: plagiarism, misattribution, or sheer forgery. That they did not may be due to the complexities of creative authorship and authenticity: questions that connected these fine and fascinating case studies.

In the most recent cases discussed here — Joyce Hatto’s piano recordings, found to be compilations cut and pasted from the work of greater virtuosi; and Mamoru Samuragochi, whose scores were ghost-written — there are financial implications. But the estate of Tomaso Albinoni (d. 1751) is not going to be worried about an Adagio, credited to him, which furnished the soundtrack of films as diverse as Flashdance and Gallipoli. Indeed, he might have welcomed the royalties cheque.