The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
CHARLOTTE RUNCIE
RADIO CRITIC
How fundamentally did National Service shape British life? There’s an Archive on 4 edition tonight exploring just that. In Call Up: The Story of National Service (Saturday, Radio 4, 8.00pm), historian Richard Vinen explores the camaraderie and optimism, as well as stories of fear, painting a complex picture.
Tom and Natasha are celebrating their first wedding anniversary in The Archers (Sunday, Radio 4, 7.00pm), when things take a dramatic turn. The BBC are tight-lipped on the details, but it’s promised that events in The Archers this week will shake the foundations of Ambridge, so watch out.
Sir David Attenborough reads Book of the Week: The Peregrine (Monday to Friday, Radio 4FM, 9.45am) by JA Baker, a classic of nature writing from 1967 which feels just as stirring and poetic today. On the open marshes of the Essex coastline, the writer compiles a diary of long winters spent looking for peregrines from the uplands that come to hunt the waders and pigeons of the shore.
From one national treasure to many more: Living National Treasures (Monday to Friday, Radio 4, 1.45pm) are people with a high level of knowledge and skill in a craft which is considered culturally significant. This deeply moving and enriching series profiles several such people, like 79-year-old Welsh calligraphy carver Ieuan Rees; oak basket weaving master craftsman Owen Jones; traditional silversmith Rauni Higson; and paper marbler
Victoria Hall.
Comedian and actor Isy Suttie (Peep Show; Isy Suttie’s Love Letters) presents Art of Now: Good Vibrations (Tuesday, Radio 4, 11.30am), a warm and witty programme about how sound and music can be therapeutic, and improve our physical and emotional health. Suttie talks about how music helps the stresses in her own life, listens to “the most relaxing piece of music in the world”, speaks to sound therapists and learns about the powerful effects of music therapy for dementia patients.
For this year’s Lent Talks (Wednesday, Radio 4, 8.45pm), six different people are presenting a series of essays on the theme of identity, taking a lead from Jesus’s 40-day struggle for answers in the wilderness. In this week’s edition, the TV presenter Simon Thomas reflects on how profound grief has had a lasting impact on his identity following the sudden death of his wife, Gemma, in 2017 at the age of 40.
In Resist Phoney Encores! (Thursday, Radio 4, 11.00pm), musician and performer Gruff Rhys, of Super Furry Animals, provides a strange and hard to describe voyage of music and comedy. He calls it “an attempt to understand crowd behaviour in order to free the audience from the tyranny of the artist, and free all people from all leaders”. He reflects on the nature of audiences, groupthink, Beatlemania and collective identity.
The week ends with an unusual edition of In Tune (Friday, Radio 3, 4.00pm). For Beat Beethoven!, Radio 3 has joined forces with Sport Relief to challenge listeners to attempt to run a 5k race faster than the time it takes to play the music of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (about 30-40 minutes) as performed by the BBC Philharmonic and broadcast live on Radio 3. The scene for the race is Salford, and among the runners will be newsreader Sophie Raworth, English National Opera’s Stuart Murphy, and Radio 3 broadcaster Tom McKinney.
Read The Week in Radio by Charlotte Runcie every Wednesday in
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