Radio listener with Jim Gilchrist: The Bonnybridge X file | Best of British: The Stanley Baxter Story

Published on 02/07/2012 00:00

Jim selects two worthwhile programmes for your aural pleasure

Keep watching the skies, as they used to yell at the end of those Fifties B-movies. In West Lothian, however, they’re still keeping a weather eye open for the saucers, as Edi Stark discovers in THE BONNYBRIDGE X-FILE.

Cue creepy music as the doughty Stark ventures into “Scotland’s Roswell”, where an unusually high level of UFO sightings has been reported over the past few decades and locals claim to have experienced all manner of manifestations – strange craft hovering over country roads, spinning lights in the sky and even “alien abductions”. She meets local councillor Billy Buchanan, who believes, in the face of some scepticism, that these are indeed unearthly encounters. And she’s also joined by BBC reporter Bill Whiteford who lives in the area and claims to have seen a UFO.

The inimitable Stanley Baxter would doubtless have created a good sketch out of it all – Parliamo Martian? perhaps. For those of a certain generation, the fruity-toned Baxter is associated not just with his TV sketches but with his increasingly spectacular Christmas shows of the 1970s in which he inevitably played most of the roles himself, like a pantomime dame on speed.

Baxter comes under the limelight on Radio 2 on Thursday as another colourful character, Eddie Izzard, presents a rare profile of the Glasgow comedian and impressionist in BEST OF BRITISH: THE STANLEY BAXTER STORY. The programme ranges over his career, with the help of interviews with associates including Maureen Lipman, Barry Cryer and Gordon Kennedy, as well as the sometimes elusive Baxter himself.

The Bonnybridge X-File

Wednesday, Radio Scotland, 2:05pm

Best of British: The Stanley Baxter Story

Thursday, Radio 2, 10pm