Radio Week
The picks of the best of this week’s radio
ENTERTAINMENT The Lyric Feature
SUNDAY, 6PM, LYRIC FM ★★★★
The Lyric Feature opens 2024 with six programmes where contemporary Irish poets celebrate the place in which they find themselves. Limerick born poet Seán Lysaght is in Mayo’s Nephin Mountains and Eleanor Hooker’s reflects on Lough Derg. Gerald Dawe’s in Dún Laoghaire and Jessica Traynor is in Banagher, Co. Offaly. There’s a group of Irish poets who have emigrated to England in Vona Groarke’s Writing Yourself Home, ending with Chandrika Narayanan Mohan’s The Salt of Something New.
Toast
THURSDAY, 12.25PM, BBC RADIO 4 ★★★★
Lurid orange soft drink Sunny Delight was a bestseller when introduced in 1998. But when news came out that a girl’s skin had been turned yellow and bright orange by the beta carotene in the drink (she had been downing 1.5 litres a day), the brand started to stagger and then bomb. You can still find SunnyD, made by another company with different ingredients, but here, Sean Farrington looks at what happened to the sugar-packed original.
FACTUAL Things Fell Apart
TUESDAY, 9AM/9.30PM, BBC RADIO 4 ★★★★★
Jon Ronson begins the new series
of his award-winning show telling the gruesome story of the deaths of more than 30 black sex workers in Miami in the 1980s. You wonder where’s he’s going with it, but this is a tale of unexpected consequences as he finds links between pseudo-scientific theories and plain racism in explanations for those deaths, and the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a white police officer.
Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley
WEDNESDAY, 11.30AM, BBC RADIO 4 ★★★★★
Lucy returns with the gripping true-crime story of the grisly ‘Bermondsey Horror’, which has all the elements of a Victorian melodrama. Lady’s maid Marie Manning was part of an open menage à trois — until the body of one of the men was found under the flagstones in her kitchen in 1849. The hunt was then on for the killer. The story ends with an execution, where Charles Dickens was an ‘astounded and appalled’ spectator.
Child
FRIDAY, 2.45PM, BBC RADIO 4 ★★★★
India Rakusen explores the extraordinary early journey that we have all been through, from fertilisation, pregnancy and birth up to our first birthday. She starts with the thrill of looking at human embryos through a microscope in a laboratory at the University of Cambridge. The cells divide, move and grow (by day six, one cell has become 100) in what Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz calls ‘a dance’.
DRAMA Our Man In Havana
SUNDAY, 3PM, BBC RADIO 4 ★★★★★
Rory Kinnear (pictured) and Miles Jupp bring a light touch to Graham Greene’s black comedy set in the Cold War. Vacuum cleaner salesman Wormold (Kinnear) is approached in Havana by a British intelligence officer (Jupp) to join MI6. He agrees, to help to fund his daughter’s extravagances, and soon he’s embellishing his despatches to keep his new bosses on side. But when things he’s made up start to come true, he feels uncomfortably out of his depth.