THE GAZETTE: Doctor Who’s Future, Coma Song Nightmares and Film Star Crushes!

This week at PG Manor, we're recovering from a rather busy weekend. We've been entertaining Hungarian actress Sonya, seeing Ricky Gervais and Jack Whitehall, preparing for a mammoth upcoming recording session—and issuing an important correction after apparently relocating Aqua to Sweden. They're Danish-Norwegian. We apologise to Scandinavia.

Following our trip back to the world of Bread, the Boswell family and 1980s Liverpool, Dr Lee has also been investigating the mysterious “cotton mill whisper” and whether workers really developed a special way of communicating above the deafening machinery.

Then it's over to the Gazers.

Listener mail takes us from biodegradable bowel-screening test paper in Australia to a sanitised version of Saturday Night Fever and a spider of frankly unacceptable proportions.

There's also some actual news to discuss. We look at the BBC's tender process for the future of Doctor Who and what its emphasis on character-driven, distinctly British storytelling might tell us about the programme's next incarnation.

Then we discover why the United Nations has backed a move away from distorted world maps that make Africa appear far smaller than it really is. The UN General Assembly has encouraged the use of equal-area projections when relative size matters, following an African-led campaign against the distortions associated with the Mercator projection.

We also learn about purple poppies commemorating animals lost in war before encountering possibly the week's most horrifying story: a woman who says that while she was in a coma, she could hear the same song her family was playing to her over and over again for a month. She later described the experience as torture.

Plus, we've started creating new YouTube companion playlists to take you even further into the films, television, music and culture we're discussing each week.

And next week we're heading back to 1961 for A Taste of Honey, Tony Richardson's landmark British New Wave film starring Rita Tushingham and Dora Bryan.

Expect pregnancy, class, race, sexuality, Salford—and presumably considerably less Bread.

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