What to do when your subversive, dog faeces-flecked cinematic career has first been turned into a John Travolta musical and then a West-End-approved jazz hands-fest? Go hitchhiking across America, of course. The always engaging John Waters talks about his new book, Carsick (Fresh Air, NPR), that charts his four-wheel escapades thumbing from his beloved Baltimore to San Francisco. Things got hairy, due to a lack of accommodating drivers ("In Baltimore, if you're hitchhiking you're a hooker without the internet"), his fashion choices (a hat that featured the driver-averting legend "SCUM OF THE EARTH"), over-vigilant police and the general all-out tedium of the process.

In fact his real experiences (being picked up by a friendly Republican and by minor indie band Here We Go Magic) pale in comparison to the imagined worst-case hitchhiking scenarios that make up half the book. There's the Poe-esque tale in which he's given a passenger seat by a cinefile serial killer who owns a cult movie director torture chamber (the disembodied head of George A Romero rolls across the floor as Josie Cotton's cover of Who Killed Teddy Bear plays in the background) and the one where he's picked up by his favourite porn actor, has sex with some aliens and then meets Connie Francis. You can't help thinking that these vignettes would have made great Waters films in the days before he had to get the thumbs up from the big studios (his last film as a writer/director was 2004's A Dirty Shame).

Another legend who forged his own way is Prince, and Mary Anne Hobbs (6 Music) got her purple party hat on in celebration of his 56th birthday. In between tunes from those who influenced him (Sly & The Family Stone, Cocteau Twins) and those influenced by him (Little Dragon), listeners declare their undying love for the purple one and Lianne La Havas chats about his love of chocolate, and how their first phone conversation ("Who is this please?" "I think you know who this is") went exactly as you'd imagine a conversation with Prince going.