Radio Week
The picks of the best of this week’s radio
ENTERTAINMENT Ian Hislop’s Oldest Jokes MONDAY, 1.45PM, BBC RADIO 4 ★★★★★
The old ones are the best, even if they only bring a wry smile or a groan. Each day this week, Ian Hislop explores the earliest examples of comedy, including our passion for parody and urge for double entendre. Paul Whitehouse and Craig Brown join him as he starts by considering wordplay, finding surprising early evidence of it in manuscripts circulating among monks in the Middle Ages.
Great Lives
TUESDAY, 4.30PM, BBC RADIO 4 ★★★★★
‘Greetings pop pickers!’ The Australia-born Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman was an eccentric ball of energy as a radio DJ (and occasional actor). He was also a generous, encouraging and very private man says Simon Mayo, who picks him as his hero. That he agreed to appear as himself alongside Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse as spoof DJs Smashie and Nicey also showed the strength of a man who could laugh at himself.
FACTUAL
The Lyric Feature SUNDAY, 6PM, LYRIC FM ★★★★★
Gerald Dawe first moved to Dún Laoghaire in 1989 and over the years has written
poems that were inspired by the town’s history, its streetscapes and its location on the southside of Dublin Bay. In From Kingstown To Dún Laoghaire he meets friends and neighbours to explore their evolving impressions of Dún Laoghaire, charting along the way some of the social changes the town has undergone from its ‘Kingstown’ past to its multicultural present.
Lady Killers
WEDNESDAY, 11.30AM, BBC RADIO 4 ★★★★
Lucy Worsley continues her hit series in which she tries to understand female killers from the past. She is joined today by the North’s Chief Justice, Siobhán Keegan, to consider the case of 19-year-old Ann Boyd, who was fired from her job as a badly paid domestic servant in a small town near Belfast for being pregnant and unmarried. In that town in the mid-19th century, there was no hiding place from the shame. But did her mother, Jane, really then kill Ann’s child?
Soul Music: Strange Fruit FRIDAY, 8.30PM, BBC RADIO 4 EXTRA ★★★★★
The background to Billie Holiday’s haunting song about lynching is, in this compelling documentary, given added power by contributions from relatives of people who suffered. Especially horrific is the story told by a cousin of Emmett Till. Visiting
Mississippi in 1955, aged 14, he was accused of whistling at a white woman — ‘that was suicide, instant death, but Emmett didn’t know that’.
DRAMA
McLevy In The New World THURSDAY, 2.15PM, BBC RADIO 4 ★★★★
Brian Cox returns as dogged pursuer of justice McLevy in an absorbing new two-part series, alongside Siobhán Redmond as Jean, who keeps him on the straight and narrow. He has set up as a private investigator in the California Gold Rush, hoping to make his fortune. But when the daughter of a black cook accused of murder begs for help, he can’t resist the challenge.