Radio Week
The picks of the best of this week’s radio
ENTERTAINMENT For The Record
SUNDAY, 6PM, RTÉ GOLD ★★★★
Aidan Gillen is an internationally renowned actor and Camille O’Sullivan (pictured with Gillen) is a singer known for her unique take on songs by artists such as Radiohead, Tom Waits and David Bowie. Both have their own diverse musical tastes and one of them is the proud owner of a vintage working jukebox full of 1970s and 80s punk and new wave 45s.
The Infinite Monkey Cage THURSDAY, 4PM, RADIO 4
★★★★
Eric Idle’s elegant rendition of the Galaxy Song (‘Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving’) has earned him a place, for this programme, in an observatory in Pasadena. Eric will join Brian Cox and Robin Ince to meet a team of boffins who scan the distant skies for planets outside our solar system. These exoplanet-hunters search for far-off worlds that might support some form of life.
The Reunion: Dr Who
FRIDAY, 11AM, BBC RADIO 4 EXTRA
★★★★
No-one wanted to direct the very first series of Dr Who, as it sounded like a disaster waiting to happen. In the end, 24year old Waris Hussein, the BBC’s only Indian-born director, took the job. The first episodes were tough going. The elderly William Hartnell struggled to learn his
Camille and Aidan lines, the special effects were a nightmare and the props nothing but trouble. In this archive show Sue MacGregor reunites Waris and some of the cast from that first series for a bit of their own time-travelling.
FACTUAL
Composer Of The Week MONDAY, 12NOON, BBC RADIO 3
★★★★ When Chopin met a trouser-wearing, cigarsmoking woman called George Sand, he was shocked and repulsed. George, who had been christened Amantine, was a bestselling novelist and, not long after that first meeting, Chopin became besotted with her. This first of a week-long series presented by Donald Macleod starts at that initial meeting in 1837, and tells how the relationship between the writer and the composer shaped their lives and work.
The Exploding Library TUESDAY, 11.30AM, RADIO 4
★★★★
The writer Rosemary Tonks penned The Bloater in four weeks, hoping to make ‘a lot of red-hot money’. Set in the 1960s, the novel catches the mood and morals of those times. In later life, Rosemary, who became a fundamentalist Christian, spent much of her time tracking down copies of The Bloater and her other works to destroy them. Comedian Athena Kugblenu tells the surreal story of the poet and novelist who ‘vanished like the Cheshire Cat’.
Girl Reading
THURSDAY, 11.30AM, BBC RADIO 4
★★★★ A girl stands at a window, reading a letter. It’s hard to tell, from her face, whether it’s good news, bad news or, perhaps, a love letter that absorbs her. Vermeer’s portrait Girl Reading is one of a long series of paintings of women reading that spans the centuries. A sense of mystery hangs over them and when we look at these pictures we search for clues about what the girls are reading. The art historian Riann Coulter takes us into the hidden world behind the canvas.
DRAMA
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell FRIDAY, 2.15PM, BBC RADIO 4
★★★★★ Agent Sam Fisher has the task of recruiting new agents for covert operations. As he sets about training the next generation of Splinter Cell operatives, an assassin from Sam’s past returns from the dead with murder on his mind. Stars Andonis Anthony.