The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
On My Wavelength
An enjoyable hour awaits nostalgia-loving armchair travellers in tonight’s Archive on 4: Night Train (Radio 4, 8pm), in which writer Horatio Clare raids the BBC sound archive for clips that summon up the romantic glory days of the night train (wood-panelled wagon-lits, a white-gloved attendant in every carriage, dining cars with strict dress codes) while negotiating the less glamorous reality of making an overnight journey from Paris to Vienna on today’s European rail network.
Emma Harding’s clever adaptation makes light work of Cymbeline (Sunday, Radio 3, 8pm), often seen as one of Shakespeare’s more problematic plays. A handful of contemporary touches and political allusions – and the judicious recasting of some male roles (with Greta Scacchi as Lucius) to tweak the gender imbalance – manage to bring it vividly to life. In The Reunion (Radio 4, 10am), meanwhile,
Kirsty Wark looks back at the tough battle between Al Gore and George W Bush for the US presidency in 2000.
Lovers of David Nicholls’s
One Day – which recently gained a new audience through Netflix’s terrific adaptation – should be glued to Book at Bedtime’s reading of Nicholls’s new novel You Are Here (Mon-Fri, Radio 4, 10.45pm), about a couple who meet on a walking holiday. We must wait until Tuesday for the “meetcute” moment, but Monday’s opener is vintage Nicholls, plunging us into his characters’ worlds and raising a smile doing so. Earlier, in About the Boys (Mon-Fri, Radio 4, 1.45pm) Catherine Carr considers the challenges of growing up male in today’s world.
Our spooky treat of the week is undoubtedly Uncanny USA (Tuesday, Radio 4, 11pm), in which Danny Robins (The Battersea Poltergeist) turns his attention to America. Robins takes us on a chilling 10-part tour of ghostly goings-on from Alaska to Texas with some UFO and Bigfoot encounters thrown in for good measure.
Fans of Alfie Moore’s It’s a Fair Cop might enjoy the view of life from the other side presented in Gary Little: At Large (Wednesday, Radio 4, 11pm). The 60-year-old comedian puts his tough upbringing in Glasgow’s East End, criminal past (from flogging pirate videos to drug dealing), eventual imprisonment and rehabilitation to entertainingly good use.
Ben Lewis, author of the
Prix Europa-winning radio drama The System, delivers another inventive piece in Drama on 4: Beltane (Thursday, Radio 4, 2.15pm), starring Neve McIntosh. Celebrating the Gaelic May
Day festival, it weaves pagan perspectives on the seasons into an atmospheric tale of love, loss and new beginnings. Over on the World Service, in Super
Rich Swedes (9.30am & 8.06pm), Stockholm-based journalist
Maddy Savage untangles how Sweden came to have more billionaires per head of population than anywhere else, from H&M heir Stefan Persson to Spotify
CEO Daniel Ek.
Claude Debussy’s fall from grace brings Composer of the Week (Friday, Radio 3, 4pm) to a fascinating close, exploring how the composer’s controversies only heightened his appeal. Scandal underpins Screenshot (Radio 4, 7.15pm), too, which focuses on this year’s 50th anniversary of classic LA thriller Chinatown and how to approach the fact that its director, Roman Polanski, was later convicted of child sex offences.