Why radio trumped TV for royal baby coverage As dawn broke yesterday on a capital freshly laundered after a night of thunderstorms, a pleasingly upbeat story was dominating the airwaves everywhere. Radio 4"s Today programme, as one would hope, was a model of probity and inventively offbeat coverage of the matter. Sarah Montague opened the programme with the most elegantly terse expression of the known facts that I heard all morning, saying simply: "The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their newborn son have spent the night in hospital." Hemingway couldn't have put it better. In the absence of any other concrete details about the birth (a fact that was clearly irking the BBC's several correspondents posted outside St Mary's Hospital), the producers had been forced to get creative. It's here that radio comes into its own, trumping rolling TV news - with its endless helicopter shots of buildings, expectant crowds, empty podiums - by having the freedom to explore the fertile edges of a story. Home Editor Mark Easton had been sent off to look through the statistics regarding births in the UK, and came back with a handful of gems. Among them: 2,200 other babies were born in the UK on Monday, a majority of whose parents weren't married; 65 per cent of babies born across England fall into the "white British" ethnic group, but only 30 per cent of those born in London do; and, perhaps most intriguingly, 73 per cent of mothers who give birth in the Borough of Westminster - as the Duchess had - were born overseas. In another off-piste highlight, Nicola Stanbridge had gone searching in the BBC's archives for material relating to other royal children. She unearthed a lovely recording of the then Princess Elizabeth in 1940, aged 14, talking to the youth of the nation on the BBC's flagship radio programme, Children's Hour. "In wishing you all good evening," she said, the voice recognisable but higher, flutier, "I feel that I am speaking to friends and companions, who have shared with my sister and myself many a happy Children's Hour." Captain Jack Aubrey, hero of this week's Classic Serial: Desolation Island (Radio 4, Sunday) is the kind of man you'd want around in a crisis. He keeps a cool head, has a strong and intuitive sense of human decency, is a pragmatist, plays the violin. Russell Crowe did a fairly good, if gruff, job of representing him in the 2003 film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World; David Robb does a much better one in Radio 4"s occasional adaptations of the Patrick O'Brian novels from whence he came. Desolation Island, the fifth book in O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series (Stephen Maturin being the Captain's phlegmatic, slightly Dr Watson-ish sidekick and confidante), follows Aubrey's new charge, the HMS Leopard, on a voyage from England to Botany Bay in Australia. Its cargo are a rag-tag assemblage of convicts, including one Mrs Louisa Wogan (Teresa Gallagher), a woman of noble bearing recently convicted of assisting those rascally upstart foes of the Empire: the Americans. "She offered to pistol the Prime Minister or blow up the Houses of Parliament," Aubrey explained at one point during Roger Danes's excellent adaptation, the "or" lending a faintly comic shade to the tableau while his voice registered a mixture of official disapproval and private respect. The production, as befits a big ticket Radio 4 dramatisation, practically reeked with nautical atmosphere: creaking planks, rolling waves, incessant bells, sailorly mutterings, groans from the unhappy - and, it turned out, Typhus-infected - convicts below decks. My favourite moment was when a newly recruited midshipman fell from a mast into the cold, unforgiving Atlantic: his long, terrified "Aaaaah!" a work of exquisite, Hitchcockian trauma. Needless to say, Aubrey instantly dived in and rescued him. The DJ and hip musical impresario Gilles Peterson (Radio 6 Music, Saturday), who made a practically seamless transition from Radio 1 to 6 Music a little over a year ago, says some strange things but plays enough wonderful music to get away with it. This week's show, he announced to listeners early on, was "your regular journey through sound, bass and melody": a line which could easily have come from Chris Morris's satirical sketchpad. Forty-six tracks followed over the next three hours, spanning everything from Steve Reich to Chet Baker to live performances from Latitude Festival by Calexico and Beth Orton. All was forgiven. Gillian Reynolds is away