Today's radio highlights - Telegraph Afternoon Drama: A Bottle on the Shore Radio 4, 2.15pm Adapted and directed by John Taylor (always a guarantee of quality) from the book by Karen Liebreich, here's how a heart-stopping message in a bottle found on a beach made Dr Liebreich turn detective. Stella Gonet plays her, heading a superb cast that includes Anton Lesser and Lucy Briers. Pound Shops R Us (Radio 4, 4.00pm) explains why empty shops all over the country are turning into booming new businesses, retail outlets where everything, from top-branded chocolate bars to multi-litre containers of milk, from packets of paper plates to packs of bacon, sells for a pound per item. The UK's discount sector is now worth £7 billion. BBC business correspondent Jonty Bloom tells the story of how they've done it. An Alternative Christmas (Radio 4,11.30am) finds rock star turned vicar Richard Coles with a stack of dark, surreal, subversive Christmas songs never played (he says) until now. Music in the Air (Radio 2, 10.00pm) arrives at pirate radio, the birth of Radio 1, the invention of the "zoo" format, how commercial radio came to Britain and why Radio Luxembourg had to die. Villette Radio 4 Extra, 10.00am Keira Knightley makes her first (and only) radio drama appearance in this 1999 dramatisation of Charlotte Brontë"s semi-autobiographical novel set in the fictional Belgian city of Villette. She doesn't play the lead (that's taken by Catherine McCormack) in a stunningly good cast, which also includes Harriet Walter, Joseph Fiennes and James Laurenson (as the married teacher with whom our heroine falls in love). Classy, eh? That's because it's a Catherine Bailey production. Radio 4"s Afternoon Drama (2.15pm) is Bearing Witness by Philip Palmer, set in 1993 and concerning an investigation of war crimes in the bitter conflicts after Yugoslavia separated into Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia. At its centre is the fictional trial after a massacre. Listeners may find some parallels with the real-life indictment of General Ratko Mladic for the massacre at Srebrenica. Mahler's mighty 5th Symphony, played by the London Philharmonic, led by Vladimir Jurowski, is at the heart of tonight's Live in Concert (Radio 3, 7.30pm). Radio 2"s big documentary (10.00pm) is The Story of The Supremes, marking the 50th anniversary of their debut album. Actually, it's not the whole story, just the early years when four teenagers (The Supremes were originally a quartet) from Detroit were slowly working their way up. Interviewees include Berry Gordy, Motown mastermind, Smokey Robinson, its presiding genius, and, from the group, Diana Ross and Mary Wilson. Mr X: Julian Maclaren-Ross Radio 4, 11.30am David Taylor makes a good case for reassessing Julian Maclaren-Ross, writer, protégé of Cyril Connolly, model for Anthony Powell's X Trapnel in A Dance to the Music of Time. "Whatever his merits as a writer, Trapnel could not be regarded as a well-balanced personality." Maclaren-Ross became a Fitzrovian legend for his drinking and pill popping, even notorious for stalking Sonia Orwell. Still, by any standards, he was a superb writer about war and what it does to people. He died of heart failure in 1964. Taylor puts him alongside Evelyn Waugh and Powell as a social satirist. He talks to Powell's son Tristram, the celebrated documentary film maker who caught him on camera, to his biographer Paul Willetts and to the poet Anthony Thwaite, about working with him in the Fifties. Writer Virginia Ironside explains how she raised money to put a headstone on his unmarked grave. And we hear from MacLaren-Ross's son, Alex. This Afternoon Drama (Radio 4, 2.15pm) is The Loving Ballad of Captain Bateman by Joseph Wilde (his first play for radio). It's a fusion of old and new, the old being the original Northumbrian ballad about a noble lord cruelly imprisoned in a far country, taken pity on by the gaoler's daughter, the new being Wilde's transposition of this to a wounded British soldier (another Captain Bateman) taking refuge with a family in Afghanistan. The Listening Project Symphony Radio 4, 7.15pm Culmination of the moving, infuriating, continually engaging series that's been on Radio 4 this autumn, conversations between people with special things to say to each other as the microphone listens. Composer Gary Carpenter has written a work around them, performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra at their new Salford base. Fi Glover, who's done a fine job presenting the whole project, hosts this half-hour with an audience of Listening Project participants. Radio 3 Live in Concert: Handel's Messiah (Radio 3, 7.30pm) comes from St David's Hall, Cardiff, performed by the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales, with soloists Susan Gritton, Delphine Galou, Topi Lehtipuu and Matthew Brook. François-Xavier Roth conducts. In the interval feature (8.20pm), Stephen Johnson's Discovering Music (a masterly series) discusses the success of Messiah, how it proved a turning point in Handel's career, composed just 24 days after receiving Charles Jennens's libretto, a triumph at its premiere in Dublin in 1742. Friday Night Is Music Night (Radio 2, 8.00pm) celebrates the music of John Williams in his 80th year. You'll hear his soundtrack scores for Harry Potter, Jaws, Schindler's List and, of course, Star Wars. The BBC Concert Orchestra is conducted by Keith Lockhart, who took over from Williams as Principal Conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra. 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