Radio review

I'm generally in the anti camp where those navel-gazing "Making Of" documentaries are concerned, the ones you see but never watch when you're flicking through the extra features sections of your DVDs.

So it was with a "here goes nothing" sigh that I tuned in to BBC Radio Scotland last Sunday to hear BBC broadcaster Janice Forsyth interview BBC radio producer Dave Batchelor about the making of a project which had the same name as the programme he was appearing on but wasn't actually it. In the end, though, the approach was justified.

Confused? Stay with me. The programme was The Complete Burns (Sunday, BBC Radio Scotland, 10.30am) and it marked the official launch of - wait for it - The Complete Burns, a three-year project to record every one of the poet's works using the voices and talents of Scotland's leading actors. Among them are Robbie Coltrane, Robert Carlyle, Brian Cox and Alan Cumming. "A dream cast list," said Forsyth. I couldn't agree more, though I'm hoping Ashley Jensen, Tam Dean Burn and Sir Sean Connery also make the list.

I have doubts about Connery. When asked who had declined to take part, Batchelor told Forsyth he couldn't posshibly shay.

There was, however, one Very Important Person who did accept the invitation, though we weren't introduced to him until much later in the programme. It was worth waiting for.

Batchelor had brought snippets from the archive as it exists so far. Some 200 poems and songs have been recorded but there are a great deal more to go. We heard Brian Cox's take on Ae Fond Kiss and Robert Carlyle giving an oddly sibilant reading of O Leave Novels. We also heard out-takes as Robbie Coltrane and then Gerda Stevenson guffawed during readings of the bawdier works.

To add some academic context there were interviews with Dr Gerry Carruthers, head of the Centre for Burns Studies at Glasgow University, and Pauline Gray, one of his PhD students. She and her colleagues have written the online commentaries which accompany each poem or song.

Robert Burns never visited Cardiff or Swansea, as far as I know, but that hasn't stopped the BBC inviting the principality's titular head to knock off a poem too - the VIP was none other than Prince Charles. He ploughed through My Heart's In The Highlands, though he was clever enough not to try it in Scots. Given his family's love of a good "shoot", the PoW must have chuckled over the line "My heart's in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer". And did the BBC film him reading it? Hope so. That's one DVD extra feature I'd love to see.