Welcome back to Room 101, which has returned to the radio – after nearly 30 years on TV – and reverted back to its one-to-one format with presenter Paul Merton. The programme sits comfortably within that peculiarly British corner of the landscape that champions The Archers, the Proms, Rich Tea biscuits and knitted dog coats. And its success makes sense. A nation of good-humoured grumblers is arguably more likely to be excited by a list of common grievances than by, say, an overly jubilant selection of Desert Island Discs. Why listen to someone talk about what makes them happy when you can witness a guy losing it over the incomprehensibility of parking signs?

Merton indulges this demographic by channelling the spirit of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. Early on in the first episode he attempts to ‘play’ an aubergine as a musical instrument before joking that baba ganoush, the aubergine-based dip, was a hit for the singer Kate Bush. You sense that his guest, Claudia Winkleman, can get away with despising aubergines (not very British) and abhorring cleanliness (again), but when it comes to picnics, you can’t help but feel she’s on to a loser.

Guests drop subtle reminders that the origins of Room 101 lie in George Orwell’s experience of a BBC conference room. Former BBC journalist Steph McGovern, for instance, speaks of her frustration with political vox pops or, more particularly, the pressure to gather a perfect balance of views on vox pops so that they’re allowed to be broadcast, which, as she says, renders the whole exercise ‘just totally pointless’. Her description of the ‘scrutiny’ she was under while engaged in precisely that ahead of the 2016 referendum feels oddly in keeping with the spirit of 101.

I thought I would miss the group dynamic of the TV version, but actually the radio format allows for more interesting argument and fewer clashing egos. There’s something of the Oxbridge tutorial room to the set-up, with Merton expertly picking holes in his guest’s logic, and his guest painfully back-pedalling when they realise their line of thinking is going nowhere. It’s great fun. With Winkleman, especially, Merton deserves plaudits simply for getting a word in.

From one Winkleman to another (I’m guessing no relation), ‘Death in Trieste’, a recent Essay on Radio 3, explored the life and murder of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. The German art historian, classicist and prefect of antiquities at the Vatican, is perhaps most famous today for driving the development of the neoclassical movement in the 18th century. I’ve read a lot of Winckelmann, but it had somehow passed me by that he was stabbed and strangled, aged 50, in a hotel room in Trieste.

Dr Sean Williams, an academic at the University of Sheffield, plays detective in what he describes as an episode of ‘true crime-turned-cultural history’. While we know who killed Winckelmann – an impoverished traveller ‘with previous’ for theft was executed after being found guilty of the crime in 1768 – we are not entirely sure why he did it, other than that he fancied the medals and coins in his bag. It may well have been as simple as that, but Williams suspects that there is more to the story than meets the eye, and that Winckelmann’s sexuality had an important bearing upon his death.

Williams’s journey through 18th-century coffee shops, Venetian canals and the antiquities of Rome makes this Essay more than a salacious whydunnit. True-crime fans may enjoy the descriptions of unpredictable acts of torture – the assassin had his body broken by a wheel – but for everyone else there’s plenty on the art and social mores of the period. Given that Williams’s ideas grow from his study of contemporary attitudes to homosexuality, it isn’t surprising that we are led through sculptures of historical gay icons such as Antinous, lover of Emperor Hadrian. But the foray into Oscar Wilde’s fate, with which most listeners will already be familiar, felt a little superfluous.

Ultimately, no one can know what was going through the mind of the man who killed the respected art historian, and I imagine some of Williams’s theories will draw sceptics. But these travels in Winckelmann’s footsteps made for fascinating, atmospheric radio.