The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
On My Wavelength
One of the year’s audio highlights reaches its climax tonight in the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World 2021: Final (Saturday, Radio 3, 7.30pm), best enjoyed on radio where the lack of the usual ecstatic audience in St David’s Hall will be less obvious as the five finalists battle it out for the world’s most sought-after singing prize. Petroc Trelawny and Josie d’Arby present live coverage.
Music also plays a major role in the beguiling, sad and uplifting Sunday Feature: Unmouthed (Sunday, Radio 3, 6.45pm) exploring the until-now lost works of poet and composer Ivor Gurney, whose creative career was thought to have ended when he was committed to an asylum after the First World War. Dr Kate Kennedy discovers a treasure trove of previously unheard poems, letters and songs by Gurney – his “poor unmouthed creatures” as he so aptly put it himself.
A treat for anyone unable to escape the city Song of the Reed: Swallowtail (Monday, Radio 4FM, 2pm) stars Sophie Okonedo and Mark Rylance in Steve Waters’s entertaining drama set in a fictional wetland nature reserve in East Anglia. Recorded on location in Norfolk, the story is drenched in fresh air and the noises of the natural world, and its conservation messaging is softened by a wit-driven script and cracking performances from its two stars.
Another drama highlight is Mr Waring of the BBC (Tuesday, Radio 4, 2.15pm) a charming piece about a roguish real-life character, Peter Waring, who made a name for himself as a post-war comedian on the BBC and used his success to… well, let’s say to his own advantage, but not entirely so. Crafted from archive documents voiced by actors, Freddie Phillips’s “curated” script is a triumph of atmosphere and concision.
Matthew Syed’s smart-thinking series Sideways (Wednesday,
Radio 4, 4pm) embarks on a welcome second run, interrogating widely held beliefs by coming at them from a different perspective. His opening subject is plagiarism and, unusually, this time his perspective is an acutely personal one, having been accused of it himself. What follows is a thoughtful exploration of the commodification of creativity and the individual’s “inevitable” lack of originality when all human culture shares, to some extent, a collective “brain”.
In Written in Scotland (Thursday, Radio 4, 11.30am),
Kirsty Wark conducts a timely four-part examination of Scottish writers’s relationship with nationhood and identity. She begins by examining responses to the first 100 years or so of the Union, and how 18th-century literary giants such as Robert Burns, James Macpherson and
Sir Walter Scott embraced the language, poetry and song of their forebears to forge a distinctive vision of Scottish identity that in many respects persists to this day.
Finally, get out those Gucci wellies and pitch a tent in your living room. The Glastonbury Experience 2021 (Friday, Radio 1, 1Xtra, 2 & 6 Music) gives over almost as many hours over the weekend as if there were an actual festival on. Radio 1 will be airing gems from past years at 10am and 11am, while from 7pm 1Xtra will be playing highlights from the Live at Worthy Farm livestream that took place last month. Over on Radio 2, Fearne Cotton will dedicate her Sounds of the 90s to those who’ve performed at Worthy Farm, and 6 Music is giving over the whole day to the festival, with arcane tracks, forgotten festival interviews and even a little Desert Island Disco.