Sleep, the eight-hour lullaby for adults

A recurring problem for the live music business is that just as the band onstage are getting into their stride, members of the audience are surreptitiously looking at their watches and worrying about the last tube. The truth is that, no matter how noisily we respond in the affirmative to the question: “Are you having a good time?”, the natural state of the concert-going audience is a bit tired. One event in the radio calendar this week recognises this.

The premiere of Max Richter’s Sleep (Saturday, 12midnight, Radio 3) comes from the Reading Room of London’s Wellcome Collection. Musicians and composer will be performing the full eight hours of the piece for an audience who will be encouraged to nod off, because it’s in the arms of Morpheus that Sleep can best be appreciated. Richter’s “lullaby for a frenetic world” was composed in collaboration with neuroscientist David Eagleman with this in mind.

Music has an honourable history of helping to send people to sleep. The live audience, increasingly kept up past their bedtime by the need to sync with the unsocial routines of performing musicians, should not feel like barbarians for looking at the insides of their lids while the band are playing. If Radio 3 feels like making this a regular feature, I can happily supply the names of a number of turns whose performances I have dozed through, some of them surprisingly loud.

Coincidentally, the man who became famous as a musician despite not really being able to play or sing, and who taught a whole generation to appreciate music that was, in the nicest possible way, a non-event, is giving the John Peel Memorial Lecture (Sunday, 7pm, 6 Music). Brian Eno promises to show how artists are symbiotically linked with businessmen, promoters and even lawyers to create the common culture. Or, as one pop star put it to me many years ago: “It’s show business. If you don’t run your business somebody else will run your show.”

Connoisseurs of speaking voices capable of making the most mundane sentences fall upon the ear like poetry are directed to Charlotte Green’s Culture Club (Sunday, 3pm, Classic FM) where her guest is Joanna Lumley, who’s plugging a concert she’s hosting in aid of the Gurkha Welfare Trust. The contest between England and Wales in the Rugby World Cup (Saturday, 7pm, Radio 5 Live) is too close to call but I can confidently predict that, although the match is coming from Twickenham, where England theoretically have home advantage, Wales will unquestionably win the singing.

I was sorry to have missed Mark Kermode’s three-part series The Business Of Film in the summer but delighted that we can catch up with it on iPlayer Radio. This is one of the best behind-the-scenes looks at how the entertainment industry works I’ve heard in years. It manages to combine reminders of the features of the industry which don’t change – getting a script off the ground is called Development Hell, multiplexes make most of their money on confectionery, Brad Pitt can make any film he wants – with those that are unique to the here and now: the money is in the sequels, the appetites of China are paramount, and simultaneous cinema and streaming releases are just around the corner.

While you’re on iPlayer Radio, you should still be able to catch the corking dramatisation of the stories of Rome in Caesar!. Brilliantly acted by the likes of David Tennant, David Troughton and Frances Barber, it’s also by some distance the filthiest thing heard on radio this year.