Humphrey Burton's magisterial account of the life of Menuhin, Master Musician (Classic FM) has passed its half- way point and reached that same decade of freedom, the 1960s. Burton does this series so well because he doesn't need to do much research. He was actually there when Menuhin conducted his son and his sisters in a performance of a Mozart concerto for three pianos. And in Medicine Now (R4) came another piece about the value of music as therapy, describing the sense of release given to dying patients when they are permitted, by professional therapists, to make music. All this rather refutes Attenborough's ideas about the natural gift of music, but the balance was restored on Saturday. Over the snobbishness, the idealism, the anxiety and the sense of power and freedom floated the voice of Joan Baez. Oh yes, we fervently sang, we shall overcome.Baez was one of the Voices (R3) chosen by David Attenborough to illustrate the pure, silvery, untrained power of human vocal chords His was, of course, an anthropologist's selection.

He is a man incapable of being less than fascinating, because everything fascinates him. He mused about the fundamental instinct that leads us to sing; gibbons, our close relatives, sing duets in the rainforests of Borneo, he said, and strong middle-aged women in Bulgaria are respected for a tradition of strident, loud, choral singing in dissonant harmony which sounded, frankly, more astonishing than beautiful.On Tuesday's Woman's Hour (R4) came a sad little item advertising classes in which mothers are having to be taught how to sing to their babies. "Well," said a Reading professor, "One can always, surely, work down a colliery, can't one?" No wonder we protested. My student children ask me about the Sixties as if they were pre-history, and in some ways they are right. Those were the days, as one contributor remarked, when students were feared, as the Chartists had once been Not for us today's angst about jobs and student loans.

We lived on our grants, we were justifiably optimistic about our futures and we marched, even if some of us can't quite remember, any more, precisely what we marched about.A Northerner recalled the nervous excitement of turning up for his first lecture in a suit, carrying a leather briefcase containing a Parker 51 and a bottle of Quink, only to have his flattened vowels publicly derided. As one who was also one of those departing teenagers (leaving her little sister ironing her hair straight at home), your reviewer found this programme a bittersweet exercise in nostalgia - patchy and perforce incomplete, but gloriously right in its tone of exhilaration and occasional despair. He stood no more chance of holding his ground than an ant in a deluge.Upping sticks to go away to study was the subject of Bloody Students (R4), which this week reached the Sixties. She preferred to remember her family's desperate grief at the death of John Kennedy - who might, indeed, have been a relation, they agreed - and her parents' strong and humorous sense of values. In those days, all she wanted was to look like Mary Quant, all straightened hair, white face and black eyeliner, which prompted her mother's comment that her eyes looked like two burnt holes in a blanket. When she got to Gray's Inn, a step that made her uncle think she was going in for hotel management, her co-educated friendliness led to her having to beat off dozens of inhibited chinless wonders, but she stayed with the ideals of her parents, who had never cared much for status based on possessions, and she developed a brisk and dismissive manner with those who, like Davies, attempt to deflect her from the points she wants to make. Though sometimes he is estimable, asking just what we want to know, sometimes he interrupts, irritatingly, with his own theories about what his guest is saying.

When Kennedy talked about her first great love, for instance, Davies insisted on renaming it a relationship, and dragging in Catholic guilt, but she brushed him tidily away, like a toast crumb. Hunter Davies, who conducts these interviews, is a mixed blessing. A cocktail of the appropriate dangerous drugs might make it seem vaguely interesting.The title of Maborosi (no cert), a first feature from the Japanese documentarist Hirokazu Kore-eda, means something like "apparition" or "Will-o'-the- wisp", and its most obvious point of reference within the film is the guilt which nags its young heroine Yumiko (one of Japan's most successful models, Makiko Esumi): was she in some way responsible for the suicide of her first husband and, in childhood, the death of her grandmother? Filmed mostly in static long and medium shots, often from behind, Maborosi is a melancholic mood piece which requires patience, and largely rewards it. Imagine that in the mid-Sixties, roughly between Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice, James Bond was sent on a mission to the States, to lift some microfilm from the FBI. Imagine that he fouled up, was disowned by M and Q and all his other Nato chums and was put in jail for the rest of his life.

Imagine that, apart from the odd briefly successful escape, the incarcerated Bond had spent the past 30 years developing an unpredictable fondness for the music of Led Zeppelin and growing his hair to Robert Plant proportions. Finally, imagine the blistering, shaken-not-stirred wisecrack that he rasps out when the Feds pull him from his lightless cell to offer him freedom in return for his help with a spot of bother. Yes, you have it: "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes." Such, or something very like them, are among the more amusing premises for The Rock (15), directed by Michael Bay, this week's contribution to that thriving sub-genre of action-thriller devoted to headcases who steal an ultimate weapon and aim it against the Land of the Free. True, the name of Sean Connery's character is Patrick Mason rather than James Bond, and his provenance is supposed to be SAS rather than OHMSS, but these are technicalities. The film's most incredible detail, and least laboured joke, is that no one stops to remark on the similarities between Mason's CV and agent 007's, or on the curious mutations three decades in the slammer have wrought on a Bondian persona: Virgil, just maybe, but would the old, red-corpuscled Bond so much as dream of letting a Spectre agent catch him quoting Oscar Wilde? The Rock's second-best joke is to set Connery's bristly roguishness off against Nicolas Cage at his most hang-dog and goofy.