Radio Week
The picks of the best of this week’s radio
ENTERTAINMENT Ken Bruce
MONDAY, 9.30AM, BBC RADIO 2 ★★★★ Dermot Kennedy (pictured) has written some cracking songs, including Power Over Me and Better Days Are Coming, a song that’s dried many a tear and lifted many a heart. Dermot, who’s been on a round-theworld busking tour to raise money for charity, is Ken’s guest all week. Dermot tells Ken how music runs in the family (his aunt is Mary Black), then picks his Tracks Of My Years, starting with songs from Garth Brooks and Vanessa Williams.
In The Studio
TUESDAY, 11.30AM, BBC WORLD SERVICE ★★★★
The Day of Reckoning finally dawned for Jarvis Cocker. That was the day that, after 20 years, he had to open the hatch of an attic, in a Victorian house in London. Behind that hatch, along with a lot of dust and spiders, lay a great store of random items from Jarvis’s past. He tells Miranda Sawyer how his musty archive, of chewing gum packets, pencils, badges and scraps of paper, became the raw material of Jarvis’s autobiography Good Pop, Bad Pop.
The Reunion
FRIDAY, 11AM, BBC RADIO 4 EXTRA ★★★★
When the first show of the anarchic sitcom The Young Ones aired on BBC2 forty years ago, hardly anyone watched it. Then the word spread about the surreal slapstick FAVOURITE SONGS: Dermot Kennedy show, audiences grew and a new series was commissioned. Sue MacGregor re-unites some of the original cast, including Nigel Planer, who played depressed musician Neil, and Chris Ryan who played Mike ‘The Cool Person’, to share stories about the chaos and the fun they had making this ground-breaking comedy.
FACTUAL
The Forum: Moths
THURSDAY, 10AM, BBC WORLD SERVICE ★★★★
Moths are the butterflies of the night, but their nocturnal habits freak some people out. The fact that there’s a species called Death’s-head Hawkmoths, which bear a skull-like pattern on their thoraxes, adds to their sinister reputation. They are though, as we hear in this discussion hosted by Rajan Datar, essential pollinators — so next time a confused moth is blundering around in your home, don’t swat it, but release it into the dark and let it flutter over the night-scented flowers.
Open Country
THURSDAY, 3PM, BBC RADIO 4 ★★★★ We’re a bit suspicious of wild mushrooms.
The fact that a highly poisonous but innocuous looking fungus called Destroying Angel grows prolifically in Ireland and the UK does little to ease our fears. Foraging expert Daniel Butler takes us into the heart of a wood in mid-Wales where the tasty, harmless penny bun mushroom flourishes. He shares tips for mushroom foraging, gives warnings about what to avoid and explains why his fellow foragers disapprove of the word toadstool.
DRAMA
The Lyric Feature SUNDAY, 6PM, LYRIC FM
★★★★
In 2018, actor Sharon McArdle and playwright Declan Gorman set out to create a theatre piece based on diaries kept by revolutionary and writer Dorothy Macardle during her incarceration at the time of the Irish Civil War. This documentary traces their voyage deep into Dorothy’s writings, and via archival sources to the gaol cell in Kilmainham where she was held and back again to the rehearsal room where the performance starts to take shape.