The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
CHARLOTTE RUNCIE
RADIO CRITIC
The release of the latest Bond film, No Time to Die, may have been postponed, but fear not if you’re in search of a 007 fix: The Man with the Golden Gun (Saturday, Radio 4, 2.45pm), starring Toby Stephens as James Bond and Martin Jarvis as the voice of Ian Fleming, is a tropical Caribbean feast of spies, assassins and thrills.
In a more sober mood, Art of Now: Christchurch (Sunday, Radio 4,
1.30pm) explores how art and creativity are often a natural and healing human response to trauma. One year on from the Christchurch Mosque attacks in New Zealand, this programme meets the artists who are making paintings, poetry, photographs and music to bring the community together in the aftermath.
The Mirror and the Light (Monday to Friday, Radio 4, 12.04pm), the majestic concluding novel to Hilary Mantel’s epic double Booker Prize-winning Cromwell trilogy, is adapted for radio. It’s read by Anton Lesser, who played Thomas More in the BBC adaptation of the first two books. We begin where Bring Up the
Bodies left off, in the wake of the beheading of Anne Boleyn.
In The Essay: Higher Thoughts and the Meaning of Welsh Mountains (Monday to Friday, Radio 3, 10.45pm), the writer Jon Gower takes us up to the spectacular peaks of the Welsh mountains. Monday’s episode is about
Snowdonia, historically a naturally defensive landscape used to shelter Welsh princes from usurpers, and now a sheltering place for unique botany and wildlife.
A traditional funeral isn’t the only way to say goodbye to a loved one, as The Documentary: Funeral Punks (Tuesday, World Service, 1.30pm) explores. Kim Tserkezie meets a “maverick undertaker” and self-styled “bad boy” of the UK funeral scene; the master of ceremonies at
The Toxteth Day of the Dead; and people who plan to have no funeral at all.
Free speech is one of the most divisive and politically urgent topics today, and it’s the subject of The Compass: The Future of Free Speech (Wednesday, World Service, 1.30pm) in a timely five-part series by the journalist Robin Lustig.
He begins in Washington, DC with the First Amendment to the US Constitution, a defence of free speech that underpins the law of an entire nation. But what does it mean 200 years later, in the age of the internet and of gatekeepers of speech in universities, religions, and courts?
In Alfie Brown’s School of Wrong (Thursday, Radio 4, 11.00pm), comedian Alfie Brown and journalist Marie Le Conte discuss how British politics works (or doesn’t), why things happen the way they do, and how things that were once thought to be wrong now seem right. Brown pulls no punches when confronting the “febrile” and “fetid” environment that social media has created in modern politics.
The week ends on a surreal note. Anneka Rice was once famous enough to be a waxwork in the foyer of Madame Tussaud’s. But times have changed, more famous people have eclipsed Rice’s stardom, and so her body has been melted down and only her waxwork head is kept for posterity at Wookey Hole. Sic transit gloria mundi. In front of a live audience for Help! My Head’s in Wookey Hole (Friday, Radio 4, 11.30am), Rice considers her life and career, the meaning of fame, and where her waxwork head is now.
Read The Week in Radio by Charlotte Runcie every Wednesday in
The Daily Telegraph
FM 88-90.2MHz
FM 90.2-92.4MHz
FM 99.9-101.9MHz
FM 99.9-101.9MHz
FM 99.9-101.9MHz