Radio Week
The picks of the best of this week’s radio
ENTERTAINMENT Vernon Kay
MONDAY, 9.30AM, BBC RADIO 2�
★★★★ Boy George, the Grammy, Brit and Ivor Novello award-winning lead singer of Culture Club, is the Tracks of My Years guest this week, offering listeners a tour through his life in ten songs. Currently playing Captain Hook in a touring arena production of Peter Pan, he’s preparing to appear in Moulin Rouge on Broadway and is also promoting his new book Karma, which he’s calling his ‘definitive autobiography’ — there have been two before.
Screenshot: Double Acts
FRIDAY, 7.15PM, BBC RADIO 4� ★★★★★ Think of Christmas entertainment in years gone by and Morecambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies and French and Saunders inevitably spring to mind. Mark Kermode and Ellen E Jones celebrate these comic duos and the likes of Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello from the film world as they look into the origins and legacy of double acts. Among their guests is Stephen Fry, half of Fry and Laurie, both of whom of course have managed to go on and have successful independent careers.
Liveline
TUESDAY, 1.4�5PM, RTÉ RADIO ONE ★★★★★
Liveline always focuses on festive fun coming up to Christmas as all shows lead to the legendary Christmas Eve broadcast
from Grafton Street. On Tuesday and Wednesday this week Joe Duffy will be presenting two shows of self-published books and talking to fascinating writers who have penned books about all sorts of topics.
FACTUAL Great Lives
TUESDAY, 4�.30PM, BBC RADIO 4�
★★★★
Philosopher John Gray chooses J.G. Ballard, author of Empire of the Sun about his traumatic childhood years in a Japanese internment camp, which was filmed by Steven Spielberg, and of Crash that became a controversial film by David Cronenberg. He may be seen as a dystopian author, concentrating on catastrophe, but Gray talks of him as a family man and a ‘lyrical’ writer, ‘whose work is an evocation of the beauty that can be gleaned from landscapes of desolation.’
The Hidden History of the Wall WEDNESDAY, 11.30AM, BBC RADIO 4�
★★★★
Going open plan may have been the fashion in houses for a while, but before then putting up walls for privacy and to create extra rooms was a preferred way to live. Cultural sociologist Rachel Hurdley follows up her look at the history of windows and attics with this new series on what walls tell us about the way we live. Her explorations take her to a reconstructed iron age village in Wales, a mediaeval manor house, and writer Elizabeth Gaskell’s Victorian home. Architectural writer Jonathan Glancey is among her guests along the way.
MUSIC
Sunday Miscellany
SUNDAY, 9.10AM, RTÉ RADIO ONE ★★★★
An extraordinary Christmas pudding, a Bethelem prayer and the power of the carol O Holy Night — this annual concert recorded in early December at the National Concert Hall is a festive highlight. This year’s writers include Aingeala Flannery, Rachael Hegarty, Michael Harding and Paul Howard, with special guests Colm Warren, Maeve Smyth, and Sarah Shine, performing alongside the RTÉ Concert Orchestra conducted by David Brophy.