The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
CHARLOTTE RUNCIE
RADIO CRITIC
Poet Murray Lachlan Young knows all about hype. At the peak of 1990s Britpop mania, he became the only poet to have ever signed a £1million recording deal. It all got too much and he sought refuge in a wood for three years. So he’s the perfect person to explore the phenomenon in Peak Hype (Saturday, Radio 4, 8.00pm), taking a clear-eyed view of such wild public phenomena as Beatlemania, punk and modern celebrity; he investigates whether smartphones are making hype more extreme.
On a more serious note, Damian Lewis stars in This is Your Country Now Too (Sunday, Radio 4, 3.00pm), a new sevenpart series (running all week) of stories from the perspective of child refugees, and the unique and often harrowing journeys they have faced amid different conflicts and disasters since 1939. In this first episode, we hear of the days after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, and how the Kindertransport scheme allowed 700 Czechoslovakian children to escape the country on trains bound for the safety of London.
In the end, are romantic relationships a luxury or necessary to a fulfilling life? In Assisted Loving (Monday, Radio 4, 8.00pm), author Kathy Lette joins Sui-Ling Tang, a receptionist from Milton Keynes who has a learning disability and requires support with daily life, for a personal exploration of how people with learning disabilities can navigate their romantic and sexual lives. The programme considers legal issues surrounding capability of consent, and there are contributions from parents and carers of people with learning disabilities about their worries and hopes for the people in their care.
The American architect Adrian Smith designed the tallest structures in the world: the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and the underconstruction Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, which will overtake it, at one kilometre tall. For In the Studio: Adrian Smith – Reaching for the Skies (Tuesday, BBC World Service, 11.30am), Eleri Llian Rees visits Smith’s studio in Chicago to meet him and discover what inspires him to push architectural boundaries.
A new series of Science Stories (Wednesday, Radio 4, 9.00pm) begins this week with Naomi Alderman and Philip
Ball. The first subject is the Scottish scientist and polymath Mary Somerville, who, as Alderman argues, became the pioneer of popular science writing in the 1830s. Somerville is a fascinating character: she was one of the first women nominated as a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the first signatory to John Stuart Mill’s petition to give women the vote.
How will you follow the general election results as they trickle in? The TV coverage always has plenty of colour-coded graphics to stimulate the eyeballs, but for updates as you drift in and out of sleep through the night, you can’t beat radio. Election 2019 (Thursday, Radio 4, 9.45pm) has a crack team lead by James Naughtie and Emma Barnett presenting full coverage of events as they happen, and analysis as the polls close.
And satire doesn’t get much more seat-of-yourpants than Dead Ringers (Friday, Radio 4, 6.30pm): half an hour of political sketches, all of them to be written after the polls close, and recorded on Friday afternoon. It will be, apparently, the most up-to-the-minute edition in the programme’s
19-year history.
Read The Week in Radio by Charlotte Runcie every Wednesday in
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