Radio Week
The picks of the best of this week’s radio
ENTERTAINMENT
Aedín in the Afternoon FRIDAY, 1PM, LYRIC FM ★★★★★
On Lá Idirnáisiúnta na mBan, International Women’s Day, Aedín fills this afternoon’s show with a celebration of women composers and musicians. There’ll be compositions from Amy Beach, Lili Boulanger and Clara Schumann as well as Irish contemporary composers Anne-Marie O’Farrell, Ailbhe McDonagh and Rhona Clarke — and performances from violinist Janine Jansen and fiddle players Zoe Conway and Liz Knowles, and songs from Annie Lennox, Kate Bush, Lisa Hannigan, Joni Mitchell, Eleri Ward, Ailish Tynan and Imelda May.
FACTUAL
The Lyric Feature
SUNDAY, 6PM, LYRIC FM ★★★★★ Irishwoman Kate Meyrick was known as the Queen of Nightclubs. She was born Kate Nason in 1875 and grew up in Cambridge Terrace in Kingstown, now Dún Laoghaire. When she was 19 she married a doctor and moved to England. Kate went on to have eight children but did not live happily ever after. In the 1920s she became a businesswoman who opened the most famous nightclubs of London’s Jazz age, went to prison five times and wrote a memoir. Through Kate Meyrick’s own words, court reports, newspapers, home secretary files, police surveillance documents, divorce papers and stacks of police reports, presenter and producer Zoë Comyns pieces together the story of Kate Meyrick — London’s Nightclub Queen.
Dead Famous
TUESDAY, 11.30AM, BBC RADIO 4�� ★★★★★
The Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer died penniless and largely forgotten. Yet the book about his most famous painting, Girl with a Pearl Earring, has sold five million copies and was the inspiration for a Hollywood film, while a blockbuster show of his work in Amsterdam last year sold out in days. Rosie Millard explores why this enigmatic artist received such posthumous fame, and the part played by a forger who sold a fake Vermeer to Hermann Goering.
Continental Riffs
FRIDAY, 10.30PM, RTÉ RADIO 1 ★★★★★ The series shares conversations between pairs of artists, makers and producers who consider Europe through a cultural lens, Today, photographer Dragana Jurisic from former Yugoslavia is in conversation with Australian-born sculptor Barbara Knezevic, born of migrant families from former Yugoslavia and Poland. They’re both Irish citizens who consider Dublin home.
DRAMA
Don’t Look Now
SUNDAY, 3PM, BBC RADIO 4�� ★★★★★
Radio 4 launches its Daphne du Maurier season with this gripping drama set in eerie Venice, based on her short story. Jamie Parker and Aisling Loftus play a couple who are spooked as each of them tries to cope with grief in their own way.
Double Exposure
WEDNESDAY, 3PM, BBC RADIO 4�� ★★★★ Another Daphne du Maurier, with Helena Bonham Carter starring as the author in this biographical drama. Widowed and troubled by insomnia and depression she is living as a recluse in Cornwall, cared for by a nurse. One day she is confronted by a mysterious visitor while out on a walk. Played by Bill Nighy, this stranger not only has an obsessive knowledge of her work but an uncanny ability to make her reveal dark truths.