Radio Week
The picks of the best of this week’s radio
ENTERTAINMENT Mark Forrest
MONDAY, 10AM, SCALA
★★★★
Mark Gatiss (pictured), whose impressive credits include The League Of Gentlemen, Doctor Who, Game Of Thrones and Sherlock, has a new venture afoot for our entertainment. He’s making his debut as a stage director with a play called The Unfriend. It’s about a well-mannered couple who invite a woman they meet on a cruise holiday to visit them. Then, things take a sinister turn, and the couple discover that manners can be murder. Mr Gatiss joins Mr Forrest on his regular show to talk about this upcoming black comedy.
Just A Minute
MONDAY, 6.30PM, BBC RADIO 4 ★★★★ Paul Merton is on the front foot and keen to win, or perhaps he just wants to beat Tony Hawks, in the first show of the new series of a comedy panel show that’s still going strong after more than 50 years. Paul gets off to a roaring start as he deploys a rather underhand tactic, delivering a monologue on the subject of A Game Of Darts. Other subjects include Nosey Neighbours, The Isle Of Wight and Tap Dancing.
FACTUAL
The Lyric Feature
SUNDAY, 6PM, LYRIC FM ★★★★
In the second of two programmes composer Linda Buckley and producer
Mark Gatiss Helen Shaw explore what connects Ireland and Iceland in story, song and music. They meet musician Arhildur Valgardóttir who performs as ‘Adda’ and find out why the organ and choirs are at the heart of music making and song in Iceland. Cellist Kristín Lárusdóttir shows the innovative nature of Icelandic music, crossing from classical to electronica, while harpist Katie Buckley with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, at the magnificent Harpa concert hall in Reykjavik, shares her journey from Atlanta, Georgia to making a home in Iceland.
Empire of Pain
MONDAY-FRIDAY, 9.45AM,
BBC RADIO 4 ★★★★
Opioids are painkillers that send artificial endorphins to the brain, giving a burst of euphoria. Soon, the body stops creating natural endorphins, and the craving for more of the drug can be overwhelming. It’s brought death, addiction and ruin to many Americans, and made the Sackler family very rich.
Kyle Soller is the reader for this week-long adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s saga about how the billionaire Richard Sackler was hellbent on making the opioid OxyContin the painkiller of choice for the medical profession, and how it has since become ‘the street drug all the drug addicts are seeking’.
DRAMA
Lusus
FRIDAY, 2.15PM, BBC RADIO 4
★★★★ Magnus is a slave to his rituals. He’s a surgeon who’s convinced that, if he doesn’t go through a daily series of repetitive actions, his patients will die. In a desperate attempt to free himself from his obsessive behaviour, he starts using a mindfulness podcast, but there’s something very odd about the podcast and it seems to be making Magnus worse. Alistair Petrie and Call The Midwife’s Ella Bruccoleri star in this creepy horror drama, which seethes with unsettling sound effects.
MUSIC
Dan Hegarty MONDAY, 11PM, 2FM
★★★★
Most people know of Paul Alwright through his Lethal Dialect moniker. In 2018, he gave us the album Hungry, which he released under his own name. Dan brings us tracks from this album all this week, and an interview with Paul from 2018 on Wednesday’s show.