Radio Listener by Jim Gilchrist

WHILE it’s a case of iceberg ahoy as the coming month sees extensive coverage of the centenary of the Titanic disaster, few people are aware that eight years before the sinking, a Scottish-built vessel which went down in UK waters constituted the greatest civilian maritime disaster in the Atlantic until the “unsinkable” giant had its fateful rendezvous with an iceberg.

In SCOTLAND’S TITANIC on Monday, Susan Morrison, the feisty comedian with a passion for things nautical, recounts the wreck of the SS Norge, a Clyde-built Danish liner which sank near Rockall, 300 miles beyond the Western Isles, in June 1904, with the loss of 635 lives. The 160 survivors from the vessel spent eight days in open lifeboats before being picked up. Morrison suggests that, while the tragedy bore some of the hallmarks of the later Titanic episode, nothing seems to have been learned from it.

Other comedians can be found in a more accustomed habitat as Clive Anderson joins Radio Scotland for a new comedy quiz, THE GUESSING GAME, in which he puts bizarre questions to panellists including Phill Jupitus, Rory Bremner, Jo Caulfield and Christopher Brookmyre.

War and its human cost is not something to be joked about, and in FATHERS AND SONS: FROM THE FALKLANDS TO HELMAND, the hard facts of soldiering are discussed across the generations. When Phil Atkins was a 17-year-old paratrooper, he was involved in vicious hand-to-hand fighting during the battle of Mount Longdon in the Falklands. A lifetime later, he was horrified when his son, Dean, announced that he was joining up, but join he did, and was later hospitalised by a bomb blast in Helmand.

Also featured are the man who led that attack on Mount Longdon, Sir Hew Pike, scion of a distinguished military family, and his son, Will, who followed in his father’s bootsteps and commanded a company of the third battalion of the Parachute Regiment in Helmand. Sir Hew muses on the business of telling next-of-kin that their loved ones have been killed, while Will discusses why he left the Army.

• Scotland’s Titanic

Monday, Radio Scotland, 2:05pm

• The Guessing Game

Wednesday, Radio Scotland, 2:05pm

• Fathers and Sons: From the Falklands to Helmand

Monday, Radio 4, 8pm