The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
CHARLOTTE RUNCIE
RADIO CRITIC
As a palaeontologist, professor Alice Roberts knows all about mass extinctions, so we should probably listen to her if there is the possibility of a human one. In Archive on 4: A Saga of Trying (and Failing) to Save the Planet (Saturday,
Radio 4, 8.00pm), she looks back at 40 years of ideas to tackle climate change, from radical forgotten proposals to plans that have actually worked.
If we are all doomed, how about some laughs? Hugh Bonneville, Joanna Lumley, Roger Allam and Mark Gatiss star in Drama on 3: The School for Scandal (Sunday, Radio 3, 7.30pm),
Richard Brindsley Sheridan’s classic comedy from 1777. It’s a story of gossip and love triangles (and shapes much more complicated than triangles), tangled social webs, money, and – of course – plenty of scandal. The critic and essayist William Hazlitt called the play “if not the most original, perhaps the most finished and faultless comedy which we have”.
Book of the Week: Lowborn (Monday to Friday, Radio 4FM, 9.45am) is an extraordinary memoir by Kerry Hudson, a meditation on class and what it means to slip through the cracks growing up in some of the poorest communities in the country. Hudson is proud of being working class, but was never proud of being poor, and her book is a clear-eyed look at her own childhood alongside an important study of what it feels like to live in the communities still suffering from extreme poverty in Britain today.
The Australian dancer and choreographer Eileen Kramer is 104 and still working. In the unmissable, beautiful Art of Living: Breath Is Life: Eileen Kramer (Tuesday, Radio 4, 11.30am), she shares the experience of dance and living expressed in breath and movement: “I think it’s coming to life,” she says of the moment of inhaling just before beginning a performance. Not many people have been dancing for over 80 years, so it’s a privilege to join a group of dance students as Kramer gives a workshop and discusses a lifelong desire for the freedom of dance.
History and comedy go well together, and in The Origin of Stuff
(Wednesday, Radio 4, 9.00pm) comedian Katy Brand takes a lighthearted and informative look at the history of small and often-forgotten-about everyday objects. For instance, this first episode is all about the origins of the toothbrush, an item which is both highly personal (you wouldn’t be happy about someone else using yours) and entirely disposable. The original British toothbrushes consisted of animal hair and bones – look how far we have come.
Players can spend dozens of hours ensconced in the imagined worlds of video games, speaking to other players or just absorbing the game’s story, characters and visual design. In What’s in a Game? (Thursday, Radio 4, 11.30am), journalist Alex Humphreys explores the battle to get games recognised as legitimate works of art. As the process of producing and distributing games has become easier, there’s apparently more space for creativity than ever.
In the light of recent events and in the wake of a series of divisive referendums, has the trust between voters and our elected representatives been broken forever, or could it be mended with a radical rethink of parliament? In Rethinking Representation (Friday, Radio 4, 11.00am), Professor David Runciman of the University of Cambridge explores these questions and some possible solutions. FM 97.6-99.8MHz FM 88-90.2MHz FM 90.2-92.4MHz