Belief on Radio 3 - another great listen this week.

Radio 3 are running another series of Belief this week which I had the pleasure of working on a couple of weeks ago and the first in the series received a very complementary review in The Guardian. Belief is a programme presented by Joan Bakewell that talks to artists, scientists and thinkers and asks them about what they believe and why.

Monday
Omid Djalili is a British Iranian and a member of the Baha'i faith, a religion which, although it only has seven million adherents, is geographically the second most widespread in the world. Omid's forbears were among its first adherents in 19th century Iran, a country in which those practising the faith are now persecuted. The core principles of Bahá'í doctrine are the unity of God, the unity of religion, and the unity of humankind. Omid's central belief is summed up in a quote from Teilhard de Chardin, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."

Tuesday
Tonight Joan Bakewell's guest is the physician, poet and philosopher, Raymond Tallis. He is Professor Emeritus of Geriatric medicine at Manchester University but has made his name as much outside the field of medicine as within it. A humanist, he writes about the transcendence of human beings and is a vigorous critic of the kind of scientific thinking which reduces them to animals. According to Tallis, only humans can point, and in that action they transcend their biology.

Wednesday
Tonight Joan Bakewell's guest is the novelist Salley Vickers. Salley Vickers wrote her first novel at the age of fifty after careers in university education and psychoanalysis. Miss Garnet's Angel, the story of an atheistic, uptight woman who flourishes during a winter spent among the churches and art of Venice, became an instant bestseller. Her succeeding novels, including Mr Golightly's holiday and The Other Side Of you, also have a spiritual dimension, featuring angels, Old Testament prophets - and God. Even so religion's arch-critic Philip Pullman describes her as "a presence to be cherished." Listen to "Belief" and you 'll understand why.

Thursday
Tonight Joan Bakewell's guest is the composer Tarik O'Regan. O'Regan, a rising star among composers, says his best composition lessons were the hours spent as an idle percussionist at the back of an orchestra waiting for his moment to play. He spent most of his childhood summers in North African with his family before studying at Oxford, and brings both the influences of the muezzin and the chorister to bear on his music. His first opera, based on Joseph Conrad's novel "Heart of Darkness" will be premiered in the autumn.

Friday
Joan Bakewell's guest on Belief this Good Friday is the Texan-born theologian Stanley Hauerwas. Born into a bricklaying family, Stanley Hauerwas says the skills he learned there are the same skills which he now applies to his academic work - and which has led Time Magazine to call him "America's best Theologian." A pacifist and a provacateur he criticises an American identity he says is built on waging war, and a church often more concerned to make good Americans than good Christians.

Monday nights programme with Omid has been reviewd by Elisabeth Mahoney in The Guardian on Tuesday...

Omid Djalili tells Joan Bakewell his fascinating life story and explains why his comedy routine can be offensive. What a fine fellow Omid Djalili sounded on Belief (Radio 3). Articulate and engaging as he spoke about being a member of the Bahá'i faith, he also seemed delighted to encounter host Joan Bakewell. "I just wanted to meet you," he told her. "I think you're wonderful." Explaining a central tenet of his faith, he used her as an example: "The Joan Bakewell we see here is going to continue in some form, just in a different essence." This is excellent news. His life story was fascinating. While growing up in London, his parents opened their house to many Iranian visitors, which meant Djalili kipping on the sofa. "I never had a bedroom until I was 14," he explained. There was a funny frankness about his memories of this time, living in a house full of fleeting strangers, "some of them charming, some of them absolutely awful". On the issue of comedy, and his standup routine, which Bakewell noted can be "riskily offensive", Djalili explained that it's deeply connected to his belief. "It's all about making people conscious, starting with myself," he told her. Life, and religion, is one long process of improving yourself, he insisted, and improving your core self. Bakewell asked him to describe his core. "I'm a fat, needy man, pleading for attention," he quipped.

Talking of offensive jokes there was a joke that was very funny that we had to take out.