The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
On My Wavelength
Three big draws today. Top of the pile is Opera on 3 (Saturday, Radio 3, 6.30pm), a live broadcast of Puccini’s Turandot from the Met in New York featuring Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska. For Radiohead fans, We’re All Living in OK Computer Now (Saturday, Radio 4, 8pm) is an absorbing 25th anniversary plunge into one of the greatest rock albums of all time. On a lighter note, in Made in Italy (Saturday, Radio 2, 9pm), ahead of next week’s Eurovision Song Contest in Turin, singer Jack Savoretti explores Italy’s rich pop music history and its influence on British writers and musicians.
Lauren Laverne gets the new run of Desert Island Discs (Sunday, Radio 4, 11am) off to a potentially fascinating start.
Her castaway is Durham-born Fiona Hill, a Russia specialist who’s worked at the highest levels in US government, serving as national security advisor to President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2019, and resigning just days before the call to Ukraine’s President Zelensky that resulted in Trump’s first impeachment.
In his unmissable Book of the Week: Good Pop Bad Pop (Monday-Friday, Radio 4FM, 9.45am) Jarvis Cocker takes a rummage through the attic space of his life. As in his much-admired Wireless Nights, the mood is wry, offbeat and profound. Today, he comes across the loft litter of his 15-year-old self, when he was already formulating the Pulp aesthetic. As he says: “Using second-hand things to create a new narrative… is pretty much the definition of the creative act.”
It’s a testament to the writing of Tom Fry and Sharon Kelly that the two-part finale of their longrunning drama Brief Lives (Tuesday & Wednesday, Radio 4, 2.15pm), about a Manchester legal practice, sounds as fresh as the first episode that aired back in 2007. David Schofield and Kathryn Hunt star as legal representatives Frank Twist and Sarah Gold who are, at last, doing the right thing and getting married. But, as ever, things become rather complicated.
“Lizzie Borden took an axe / and gave her mother forty whacks…” There weren’t many Victorian-era murders in America notorious enough to cross the Atlantic in a nursery rhyme. Which makes the subject of this week’s Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley (Wednesday, Radio 4, 11.30am) one of the oddest in criminal history. Lucy Worsley invites historian Cara Robertson and true-crime investigator Erin Moriarty to reassess the grisly 1892 double axe-murder.
In A Life in Miniatures (Thursday, Radio 4, 11.30am) author Max Porter reflects on the role played by model villages in his formation as a writer. He revisits Bekonscot Model Village in Buckinghamshire, which he was fascinated by as a child growing up in High Wycombe. He also speaks to historian Melinda Rabb about the 18th-century craze for modelmaking, and Scottish writer Douglas Stuart about a miniature village that appears in his Bookerwinning novel Shuggie Bain.
Some of the UK’s most prestigious boarding schools come under investigation in journalist and author Alex Renton’s new series In Dark Corners (Friday, Radio 4, 11am). Renton attended three public schools and his book, Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class, concerns a long-standing culture of abuse and the trauma of being sexually abused as an eight-year-old by one of his teachers. His first stops are two elite schools he attended: Ashdown House and Eton.