This week's best radio: remembering hip-hop history and partition

It is 30 years this month since Eric B & Rakim released their album Paid in Full, which inaugurated the golden age of hip-hop. If you need reminding how remote that era is from today, subtracting the same 30 years from 1987 would take you to a world yet to experience Elvis Presley’s Jailhouse Rock. Hip Hop Hooray (12 August, from 7am, 6 Music) is the faintly Crackerjack title given to 12 hours of programming celebrating this anniversary and its musical heritage, fronted by Mary Anne Hobbs, Huey Morgan, Liz Kershaw, Gilles Peterson, Craig Charles and Nemone.

A mere 20 years before Paid in Full, the Marine Offences Act of 1967 was bringing to an end the short and colourful career of the UK radio pirates and ushering in Radio 1 and 2. In Johnnie Walker Meets the Pirates (14 August, 10pm, Radio 2), the man who kept broadcasting in the early days of illegality talks to Emperor Rosko, Tom Edwards, Tony Blackburn, Pete Brady and others about their brief life on the ocean waves.

Marking the 70th anniversary of the partition of India, there is a new dramatisation of Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children (14 August, 11.45pm; 15 August, from 9am, Radio 4), whose hero Saleem Sinai is born on the stroke of the clock that announced the birth of this momentous new arrangement. Another literary offering comes in the form of Love Henry James: The Portrait of a Gentleman (12 August, 2.30pm, Radio 4), Peter Ansorge’s dramatic explanation of what was going through the mind of the master when he was writing The Portrait of a Lady in 1880. James wrote the instalments of the novel – which was being published in magazines long before he had decided how it was going to turn out – in the city of Venice. He found that the natural wonders of the place, including a handsome young gondolier, kept him from getting on with his work as he would like. Here Guy Paul plays the writer, while Katherine Kingsley is the American novelist trying to get her hooks in him.

The people who do The Daily, the excellent news podcast from the New York Times, are slowly realising that the current state of play in Washington means that they have a situation and a cast of characters in their crosshairs who are more extreme and more interesting than the highly coached stars of pop music, movies and sport. And so they’re following the goings-on in the city with a new podcast called The New Washington. Introducing the new stream, the paper’s Carl Hulse observes that politicians are far more likely to submit themselves to a long conversation than to the cut and thrust of a press conference or TV interview. With the new extended interview format, the politico hopes they will get their point across and the journalist hopes they’ll get something more illuminating than the usual dead bat. Watch this stream.