If half the world's folk music sounds like a lament for lost rural communities, maybe that's because as of now, for the first time in history, half the world's folk live in cities.
John Pickford's five-part Goodbye Village/Hello City (BBC World Service, Friday, repeated at various times) is another chorus for the global lament. In World Service style, Pickford globe-trots his way from England to India, from Ghana to America's Great Plains, in search of what's left of rural habitation, and what's becoming of urban conglomerations.
In Delhi, rural migrants are entering the city at a rate of 8,000 every week; around London, on the other hand, the "countryside" population is technically increasing - because areas classed as rural are being effectively absorbed by the conurbation. (Readers enjoying a weekend break from their Offaly-to-Dublin commute will scarcely need telling about that.)
These massive expense-account documentaries don't always work so well when they're trying to draw thematic coherence from diverse experiences. Last year's World Service programmes on the illegal drugs trade were particularly effective because we were clearly tracking one process, one commodity, from, for instance, the Andean-highlands coca-farmer to the London-Docklands cocaine-snorter.
Pickford has the more awkward task of first persuading us that it makes sense to connect the weekend cottage in Berkshire with the stinking slum in Bombay, that something more tangible than the catch-all scapegoat of "globalisation" unites events and trends around the world. In developing countries it still makes some sense to talk about villages as relatively self-contained communities - one talking head suggested India has a million of them, counting tiny hamlets. Has this anything to do with what's left of the "village" in the developed West?
At any rate, Pickford started his global quest with villages - "so much at the roots of human life that it's easy to imagine they've been around forever". Actually they're pretty new - 10,000 years, just a fraction of the history of a species whose "natural" habitation (if the word natural means anything in this context, which it probably doesn't) is here and there, following the food. Villages started when we insisted the food come to us, in the form of agriculture.
And now, at last, villages have changed.
In Rajistan, India, as the members of an older generation recalled patterns of back-breaking agricultural work virtually identical to those endured by their great-grandparents, Pickford found younger people faced with strange new forces: the pull of the city, as heard on radio and seen on TV; more powerfully, the push of deepening rural poverty, caused in part by global market operations and environmental pressures. Even a Delhi slum-dweller can earn cash that makes a difference back home.
In Ghana, Pickford paints an incongruous word-picture of schoolchildren heading into the fields with cutlasses to cut grass.
Margaret, a village farmer, climbs the hill to her family plot and tells him about her ambition for her children: "I want them not to be so tired."
Her village has electricity and decent roads - carrying the urban broadcast media in, carrying the young people out.
In most of episode one, Pickford too easily embraces romanticisation of the village and demonisation of the city, to which people adapt extraordinarily well and which rarely descends into the sort of apocalyptic disorder posited by this rhetoric (the Mater casualty department notwithstanding).
Nonetheless, this series is one of those useful pauses that the Beeb offers so often and so well, a chance to ask, with genuine global vision, just what is going on.
A new comedy series, Two Doors Down (BBC Radio 4, Friday), hints that there's some echo of village life along the south Belfast road where it's set. There's hardly anything new about that assumption - perhaps you've heard of Coronation Street? - but there is a difference here: this is a posh area where "community" is a function of the housekeeper whom the locals share.
Sally (Frances Tomelty) is that highspirited lady - her employers, she tells us, love to say, "there goes our housekeeper on her motorbike".
The first employer we hear, Claire, is dismissed with a familiar anti-intellectual flourish: she's been working for five years, she reminds Sally, on her study of "the pre-menstrual mood swings of Maud Gonne".
On the basis of last night's first episode, this series features the sort of cracking ensemble acting we've come to expect from the stable of Belfast-based productions; what it hasn't quite got is the sort of cracking script demanded by such ensembles - and by the sort of social satire this aspires to be. Still, listeners may enjoy its picking at the peculiar pretensions of Queen's University and environs.
LOVE Letters from the Front (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday) was another ensemble piece, though it could just as easily have been a monologue, since virtually all its text was drawn from the letters of one young British soldier, a lost soul in Flanders fields.
Although this was in the documentary slot, Love Letters fits that description only loosely: it was based on real events, real documents, but, really, Lorelei Harris's programme was drama, and high drama at that.
Eric Appleby, from near Liverpool, trained in Athlone in early 1915, where he met Phyllis Kelly, daughter of a local solicitor. Over the subsequent 18 months, he wrote her 200 letters for which the word "love" is an insufficient adjective. Lorelei Harris has excerpted them beautifully, and shared their text and context among several voices - one for Eric, one for young Phyllis, one for old Phyllis.
Their patterns, repetitions, omissions and connections make an almost musical lament.
The unbelievable, undisguised, unglorious misery of the trenches comes across brilliantly here, partly because Eric, not averse to complaining, also appears to be deliberately sparing of gory details; he rarely talks about death except in the abstract.
Day after day - and the programme carefully recites the date of every letter, even those not quoted - he tells Phyllis instead about his longing for her. "Why can't the impossible things sometimes happen?" he asks, with piercing poignancy, before signing off, as usual, "your Englishman".
"Dear heart, sweet heart, lady mine", he calls her, even imagining himself her medieval knight, in a lament that 20thcentury warfare so little resembles the heroic fighting of old.
His spirits seem to rise only when he's sent on a reconnaissance mission into no man's land - a chance to do something other than just wait for death to fall.
Finally, in the autumn of 1916, it seems his reserve cracks, and immediate images of death enter his letters.
"So many good people seem to be going now . . . We have just buried my friend, dear old Burrows - he died yesterday at 5.50 of shrapnel wounds." In the following days it gets worse, far worse: "There are bits of poor wretches lying unburied all over the place."
Valentine's Day listeners might have hoped against hope for some reprieve, but we know too well the invariable equation of true love and tragedy.
The twin telegrams, "dangerously wounded" and "died", are next to arrive.
Phyllis, however, writes her own letter in between the two of them, a letter never sent and so kept, until her death a decade ago, with her precious collection of his missives: "Oh, Englishman, you are my life and my world."
And there wasn't a dry eye in this house.