IN a week in which radio was keen to travel the world (Radio 4 alone went to Odesa, Mount Everest and the Norfolk Broads), Peter White proved the most entertaining travel guide. Blind since birth, the In Touch presenter took us to Los Angeles in The Compass: Sounds of the City, which aired on BBC World Service on Wednesday. The result was a rather delightful travelogue which offered a quirky, alternative guide to LA led by smell and touch rather than sight.

White’s Airbnb in the city was called Ganja Getaway for a start. “There’s a certain smell in the air,” White noted. Turns out legalisation has led to pot farms being transformed into accommodation. Cannabis is fine indoors, White is told, “but tobacco outside please.”

White proved hugely game throughout. He even had a go at surfing. He did ask his instructor if he should be worried about sharks. “There are definitely sharks out there,” he was told,” but they’re not too active. At this beach there’s never actually been a bite.”

At which point I’d be back in the changing room. But White went out onto the water. And even managed to stand up. There’s another episode to come. Hurrah.

Not that you have to travel quite so far to make good radio. Lights Out (Radio 4, New Year’s Day) looked at climate change activism in the UK and managed to get beyond the tediously reductive framing of the issue usually employed on the Today Programme, while The Sound Collector on Bank Holiday Monday, an award-winning student short by Talia Augustidis, was a deeply moving feature on childhood, memory and grief. The start of a glittering audio career, hopefully.

But my favourite wireless hour this week came from Suffolk. The Collection: Peel Acres returned to 6 Music on Sunday with another guest rummaging around the late John Peel’s record collection. It’s a fun format and it helps when your guest is Jarvis Cocker. Because the Pulp frontman has the best voice and because he just sounds like good company.

This was an hour of Jarvis largely trying to find obscure, often angry, punk records with Peel’s son Tom Ravenscroft. But it was the asides that were the most fun.

“Quite big cobwebs up there actually,” Jarvis noted at one point as they climbed up into a loft. “We need to fire the staff,” Ravenscroft replied. “We need to fire my mum.” Jarvis was too polite to suggest Tom might do it himself.

There were even some insights into John Peel’s paternal qualities. After an archive clip in which Peel himself found a record a younger version of Jarvis had asked him for, Ravenscroft told the present-day Jarvis, “If he hadn’t found it, he would have been really angry. If ever there was a record missing we would immediately be blamed for it.”

“I never realised I was putting you in so much danger,” Jarvis replied.

“We would occasionally take things,” Ravenscroft conceded, “but mainly Nirvana albums.”

More musical nostalgia on Ireland’s Radio Nova this week where Ken Sweeney interviewed Robert Forster of The Go-Betweens (there’s a link to the programme on Ken’s Twitter feed, @KenSweeney). When the opening chords of Cattle and Cane started playing I was suddenly 21 again.

I was taken even further back listening to 5 Live’s celebration of Sports Report on Monday night. The theme tune Out of the Blue always instantly transports me back to a Northern Irish kitchen on a Saturday afternoon some time in 1978. The programme was a lovely nostalgic wallow in all our sporting yesterdays (even for Sportsound listeners, I imagine).

Or at least it was until it played Peter Jones’s harrowing, reflective commentary spoken on April 15, 1989 at Hillsborough, on a day when football fans died because they had simply gone to watch a match. It’s such a potent, painful clip. A reminder of the power of radio and how it can take us to the darkest places and still offer light.

Listen Out For: Open Country, Radio 4, Thursday

Helen Mark is in East Lothian this week. She visits Gullane Beach and Dunbar.