Radio Week
The picks of the best of this week’s radio
ENTERTAINMENT
One Person Found This Helpful
MONDAY, 6.30PM, BBC RADIO 4 ★★★★
Frank Skinner is the genial host of this latest panel show. It’s based on genuine online reviews left by people, the more baffling and offbeat the better. Rounds include What Did I Buy? and Where on Earth Are We? The funniest in this first show is The Reviewee Bites Back, with comics including Simon Evans and Amy Gledhill invited to suggest a witty comeback for businesses given a pasting online.
Vernon Kay
TUESDAY, 9.30AM, BBC RADIO 2 ★★★★★
Aussie pop icon Delta Goodrem joins forces with Gary Barlow to perform a Take That cover version in this final week of Piano Room month. The names get even bigger as the week goes on, with Elbow playing live tomorrow; Rod Stewart performing with Jools Holland on Thursday, ahead of the release of their new album Swing Fever featuring songs from the big band years; and then the Pet Shop Boys on Friday.
FACTUAL
The Lyric Feature
SUNDAY, 6PM, LYRIC FM ★★★★
This two-part series presented by J.J. O’Shea brings us the fruits of a project revisiting the Irish Folklore Commission’s collection of tunes and songs which were transcribed and notated by Séamus Ennis in Connemara and Donegal. In this week’s episode we hear melodeon player Johnny Óg Connolly play and discuss the tunes An Stoirm Is An Bháisteach and Hardiman The Fiddler. Bríd Ní Mhaolchiarán sings Binsín Luacra, and Neansaí Ní Choisdealbha interprets The Mist On The Mountain and The Angry Peeler.
Hollywood Exiles
WEDNESDAY, 11.30AM, BBC WORLD SERVICE ★★★★
In the first of a 10-part series, Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter Oona tracks the rise of ‘the Little Tramp’ from poverty in London to the big time. But by the 1960s he was exiled from America, with the authorities suspicious that he had Communist sympathies. Chaplin’s daughter Geraldine, recalls him assuring her he was not a Communist. ‘Poverty left its mark on him,’ she said, ‘and made him defend the underdog. But if you defend the underdog you’re a Commie.’
Continental Riffs
FRIDAY, 10.30PM, RTÉ RADIO 1 ★★★★
A series of conversations between pairs of artists, makers and producers, that considers Europe through a cultural lens. In this episode, Nóra Hickey M’Sichili, director of Le Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris — Ireland’s cultural flagship in Europe — talks to London-based dance artist and choreographer Fearghus Ó Conchúir.
DRAMA
Oleanna
SUNDAY, 7.30PM, BBC RADIO 3 ★★★★
David Mamet’s explosive play about the power struggle between a professor and a female student who accuses him of sexual harassment divided audiences 30 years ago. The film was less good, now Mark Bonnar and Cecilia Appiah star in the first radio version.
Conversations From A Long Marriage
THURSDAY, 6.30PM, BBC RADIO 4 ★★★★★
Joanna Lumley and Roger Allam return for a fifth series of the warm comedy about a gently bickering but happy couple. With Joanna’s birthday looming, Roger announces that he’s taking her away. She thinks she’s going to be pampered but he reveals that they’re heading for the hills in a campervan!