Zero Gravity (11.00 am R4). The creative potential of weightlessness, with a group of Moscow-based dancers, acrobats and filmmakers. Sounds like the kind of programme that would look better with moving pictures.
Performance on 3: Whiteman's Radio Rhapsody (7.30 R3). Recreating a pre-war programme from New York’s Radio City Music Hall. ? Russia: Gold Domes, Black Earth (8.30 World Service, repeated Sat 2.30 am). Three-part series by Tim Whewell on Russia and its history begins by considering the role of the intelligentsia.
Conquistadors (9.00 BBC2; 9.30 in Wales). Part two of Michael Wood’s historical adventure is about Pizarro’s destruction of the Incas and his "greatest plundering raid in history". Wood retraces the trail that Pizarro and his men took into the capital of Cusco as well as into the "lost valley" where Incan ruler Manco made his last stand. In Cusco, Wood is assisted by historian Efrain Trelles, and Juan Ossio from the Catholic University of Peru shows Wood a rediscovered Inca account of the conquest. ? Friday Play: Describing Music to Carl (9.00 R4). The theme of Jerome Vincent’s docu-drama is the meaning of music to a deaf boy - and includes contributions from philosopher Jonathan Ree (whose I See A Voice, published last year, was about cultural attitudes to deafness) and deaf performer Paul Whittaker.
Night Waves (9.30 R3). The two Cubas (of Havana and Miami). ?
Meetings with Remarkable Trees (9.50 BBC2; 10.20 in Wales). "The Squire’s Walking Stick". Ireland’s tallest oak - which happens to be on author Thomas Pakenham’s land.
The Old Devils (11.00 UK Drama, also Saturday 11.10, Sunday 11.25). Re-run of Andrew Davies’s 1992 adaptation of Kingsley Amis’s novel. An earlier Amis novel, but a more up-to-date Davies adaptation, is screened on Sunday in Take a Girl Like You (9.00 BBC1).