Star rating: **** Richard Thompson has always had a touch of the hands-on musical historian about him, from his propensity for dressing up in Lincoln green and acting like Robin Hood while the rest of Fairport Convention slept off their hangovers to distilling centuries of folk tradition into rock guitar solos.

Star rating: ****

Richard Thompson has always had a touch of the hands-on musical historian about him, from his propensity for dressing up in Lincoln green and acting like Robin Hood while the rest of Fairport Convention slept off their hangovers to distilling centuries of folk tradition into rock guitar solos.

So there will be few musicians more capable of travelling from the put-upon minstrelsy of Richard the Lionheart - the John Denver of his day, quoth our host - through to Nelly Furtado's brash pop of the noughties, and fewer still likely to carry it off with such skill and entertainment as Thompson brings to his 1000 Years of Popular Music presentation.

There are times, particularly around the 1600s as madrigal and early opera sustain the chronological effort, when a certain contractual obligation element creeps in. But any dryness of content is more than matched by the dryness of Thompson's wit and the enthusiasm of his accomplices, Judith Owen and Debra Dobkin, on vocals, keyboards and percussion.

As well as resembling ye olde Jennifer Saunders doing Stevie Nicks, Owen is no small asset in the music hall segment and a formidable torch song talent, allowing Thompson to enhance Cry Me a River with typically high-tensile guitar creativity.

Much of what's included is - or has been - Thompson's home territory anyway, including the bleak Three Ravens and a proto folk-rock Blackleg Miner. More instructive perhaps, not to mention fun, were the brilliant romps through the Easybeats' Friday on My Mind and Abba's Money Money Money and the priceless donation of a Latin chorus to Nelly Furtado's Maneater.