TODAY’S RADIO

ON YOUR FARM

6.35AM, RADIO 4 HHH

Smoke from fires in Australia clung to the grapes in the vineyards of Hunter Valley. Most of the grapes were dumped, and an entire vintage was written off. Winemaker Christina Tulloch made a virtue of necessity, teaming up with a distillery to produce a smoky tipple from the surviving grapes, called Hunter Valley Shiraz Spirit. It has proved, as Christina tells Peter Hadfield, to be a big success.

THE PLAGUE

3PM, RADIO 4 (FM) HHH

This may be a bit too close to the bone for you. Albert Camus’s 1947 novel La Peste tells the story of a French town suffering an outbreak of bubonic plague.

The novel was adapted for the

Ruthie Henshall (7pm, Radio 2) stage in 2017, and the parallels between Camus’s fiction and our own reality are horribly close as fear, denial and death turn the lives of citizens of the quarantined town into a nightmare. Neil Bartlett’s adaptation has been recorded in lockdown, with all the actors working from their own homes, with powerful results.

SUNDAY NIGHT IS MUSIC NIGHT

7PM, RADIO 2 HHHH

We get big hits from Hairspray, Mamma Mia!, Aladdin, Dreamgirls and other West End musicals in this concert, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall, with the London Musical Theatre Orchestra conducted by

Freddie Tapner. The singers include Ramin Karimloo, Ruthie Henshall and Marisha Wallace.

ANALYSIS

9.30PM, RADIO 4 HHH Britain went late into lockdown, but more willingly than many experts anticipated. Sonia Sodha hears how fundamental misunderstandings of human behaviour and the hope of herd immunity affected the UK’S handling of the pandemic. SJ