The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
CHARLOTTE RUNCIE
RADIO CRITIC
Synthesised human voices, the voice of God, and voices we’ll never hear again are all to be found on radio this week. Tonight in Judy Garland: The Final Rainbow (Radio 4, 8.00pm), Renée Zellweger explores Garland’s final concerts at London’s Talk of the Town in 1969, which are also the subject of a new biopic, Judy, starring Zellweger. The actress used rarely-heard archive recordings of Garland’s final performance to inform her portrayal of the star, and this collection of archive and eyewitness accounts of Garland’s life attempts to separate the woman from the myth.
As part of 6 Music’s Graphic Content season focusing on comic books and graphic novels, in Paperback Writers (Sunday, 6 Music, 1.00pm) Neil Gaiman presents an hour of music that has changed his life and shaped his writing career. Gaiman is the author of the comic book series
The Sandman and novels Stardust and American Gods.
Andrew McGibbon’s occasional excursions into the unsung heroes of pop culture returns with I Was Stanley Kubrick’s Sleuth (Monday, Radio 4, 4.00pm), an interview with Anthony Frewin, who was Kubrick’s assistant for years. His work was varied, and most strangely involved the job of tracking down two different people who had been pretending to be the great director. One of them convinced two TV Times reporters that he was Kubrick, and gave them an interview.
In the age of fake news, data breaches and presidential tweeting, is traditional diplomacy over? In Leaks, Tweets and
Modern Diplomacy (Tuesday, Radio 4, 11.00am), the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent James Landale gives an intriguing exploration of what modern diplomacy is all about, with the digital revolution making the job harder than ever. Presidents can now WhatsApp each other whenever they like – so where does that leave the diplomats? Contributors include the former Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt.
For God’s Work (Wednesday, Radio 4, 11.30am), the investigative journalist Lucy Cooper has been following the lives of three vicars for a year, as they work in parishes in the north-east of England. Cooper questions whether the Church of England – and Christianity – still have a place in the modern world, and asks priests what makes them want to keep working for God.
Even occasional visitors to Ambridge should make a note to tune in to The Archers (Thursday, Radio 4, 7.00pm), as the Grundy family bids a sad farewell to a legendary figure.
After all of the slightly wild storylines of recent months, this week we get back to the heart of The Archers with events that will consume one of Ambridge’s central dynasties, with grief sure to be felt for a long time.
And Late Junction (Friday, Radio 3, 11.00pm) begins a new strand on the wider philosophical ideas surrounding music, beginning with the relationship between technology and the human voice. Jennifer Lucy Allan is joined by author and artist Kristen Gallerneaux to explore the idea of the voice as contagion, from Thomas Edison’s early talking dolls to a look at the work of Richard Gagnon, inventor of an early text-to-speech synthesizer, the voice of which has spread through electronic music and pop culture through Kraftwerk, hip hop, educational robots and video games.
Read The Week in Radio by Charlotte Runcie every Wednesday in
The Daily Telegraph