Listening Brief

Peter Day's history of Intel's expensive new silicon chip plant in Ireland this week deals with the problems which hit it immediately it opened. The Ramp (Radio 4, 9.0pm) chronicles the Asian economic collapse which drove chip prices through the floor. The world was suddenly awash with desperate manufacturers unloading stock and Intel needed to think up some pretty creative marketing moves.

Radio 2's evening is devoted to A Night In Memphis, exploring the history and impact of the city that bred the blues, rock' n 'roll and soul. After a brief sample of the music comes, inevitably, Elvis In Memphis (Radio 2, 7.30pm). DJ George Klein, who attended the same high school, avers that Presley spent much of his later life reading up subjects he'd ducked in class. Maybe, though human dietary requirements were clearly not among them.

Dr Michael O'Donnell examines the wobbly divide between illegal substances and useful analgesics

Throughout the week Sound Stories, (Radio 3, 11.00am) devotes itself to families who've had a notable musical impact. Peggy Reynolds sticks firmly to modern examples: otherwise she'd need months simply to plough through all those Bachs. Her first choice is the Dolmetsch clan, well-known to youthful recorder players. Their patriarch, Arnold, launched the early music revival in 1925 when he began the Haslemere festival. The offspring of his three marriages are still going strong.

Stephen Lawrence - The Truth (Radio 5 Live, 8.0pm) presents a two-hour reconstruction of key elements of the recent official inquiry. Because no microphones were allowed at the hearings, much detailed evidence went unpublicised. Trevor Phillips helps analyse each section of the re-enacted transcripts - and the lessons to be learned from them.

Controller James Boyle never quite gets it right. While Feedback's away undergoing its MoT, two genuine tours de force slip into the Radio 4 schedules. The first is Michael Mears's Afternoon Play: A Slight Tilt To The Left (Radio 4, 2.15pm). Mears plays every character in his first radio drama, a touchingly comic study of two brothers' response to their father's death. Having already won two Edinburgh Festival prizes, it's probably time for another statuette on his mantelpiece.

The United Nations has proclaimed 1999 the Year of Older People, which will burst new on those in the BBC who think aiming pap at adolescents increases the audience. But not, happily, on producer Olivia Seligman, who devotes today's edition of In Our Time With Melvin Bragg (Radio 4, 9.0am and 9.30pm) to a debate on whether we really have to get old. The gerontologist Professor Thomas Kirkwood of Manchester University doesn't think it inevitable and argues his case.

In keeping with his global theme, the second of Professor Anthony Giddens's 1999 Reith Lectures (Radio 4, 8.0pm) comes from Hong Kong. It's devoted to risk - a concept unknown to medieval society, where unforeseen developments were ascribed to fate. We may understand the world more fully now but that doesn't necessarily mean we can manage the risks any better. How, for example, do we propose to cope with global warming?

Sheridan Morley embarks on a new series about one of the 20th century's most characteristic light entertainments, stage musicals. They supplanted musical comedy by incorporating modern dance into what, by the '40s, had become a rather tired formula.

In April 1600 the Dutch ship de Liefde, only survivor of five which left Rotterdam two years earlier, landed on the island of Kyushu, encouraged throughout its hazardous voyage by tales of the rich trade Portugal had established with the Japanese. The pilot was Will Adams, first Englishman to land in Japan.