The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
CHARLOTTE RUNCIE
RADIO CRITIC
Talking frankly about money is always tricky, even – perhaps especially – with those we love. Maybe relationship counsellors could be more useful than accountants in helping to balance the books. That’s the premise of The Money Clinic (Saturday, Radio 4FM, noon), which invites listeners to eavesdrop as a couple speak to a relationship counsellor about their finances and how they feel about them. In the first episode of the series, newlyweds Nick and Eve discuss how linked their finances should be, and why they have such different attitudes to money.
In Moira Stuart Meets: Katherine Jenkins (Sunday, Classic FM, 9.00pm), the eminent broadcaster launches a new series in which she interviews guests from the world of arts, politics, sport and entertainment and invites them to pick the classical music that has been important to them. In the first episode she meets Welsh soprano Katherine Jenkins.
Although the pandemic has made production of new radio difficult, some of the radio that has been made is thoroughly innovative.
Take Decameron Nights (Monday to Wednesday, Radio 3, 10.45pm), a theatrical twist on Boccaccio, for instance. The Decameron was originally written in the aftermath of plague in the 14th century. Theatre company 1927 had their planned international tour cancelled this year, but have instead made this dark and comic late-night adaptation for Radio 3.
Trying to make an effective Covid-19 vaccine is complicated; not just the challenge of creating the vaccine itself, but to manufacture and administer it to billions of people, and fast. The Documentary (Tuesday, BBC World Service, 9.06am) looks at the challenges ahead and the plans that are being put in place to overcome them.
Paul Sinha, the comedian and star of The Chase, and the reigning British Quiz Champion, clearly knows a thing or two. Paul Sinha’s General Knowledge (Wednesday, Radio 4, 6.30pm) is the second series of his celebration of strange and true facts, and the first episode focuses on facts about writers, including the tale of a certain famous writer who played for Portsmouth FC. But weirdest of all is probably the fact this programme was recorded during lockdown to a virtual audience of 200 people all in their own homes.
British Summer Time Begins: Summer Holidays 1930-1980 (Monday to Friday, Radio 4FM, 9.45am) is the Book of the Week. Fenella Woolgar reads Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s celebration of childhood summer holidays in the mid-20th century. Memories include the frantic preparation for a trip away to the seaside, from waking up early in the morning and packing a car fit to burst, as well as comparisons between the solitary summers of only children compared with being stuck with siblings for weeks on end.
And New Storytellers (Monday to Friday, Radio 4, 1.45pm) is a showcase of the five winners of this year’s Charles Parker
Prize for best student radio feature. Listen out in particular on Thursday, for Richard Queree’s documentary about the fading art of cinema projectionists, and, on Friday, Alex Morgan’s programme about homelessness. She focuses on a man named Kane Walker, who was homeless and died on the streets of Birmingham in a freezing underpass. Morgan met him just a few weeks before his death.
Read The Week in Radio by Charlotte Runcie every Wednesday in
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