The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
CHARLOTTE RUNCIE
RADIO CRITIC
Glyndebourne’s festival is cancelled this year, but tonight on Radio 3 there’s the chance to hear an electrifying
2002 performance from its hallowed stage, directed by David McVicar. In Opera on 3 (Radio 3, 6.30pm), Anne Sofie von Otter shines in the lead role of Bizet’s Carmen, with Marcus Haddock as Don José.
As part of Radio 4’s series celebrating the 1920s, Linda Marshall Griffiths has dramatised Virginia Woolf ’s classic political and feminist text, A Room of One’s Own (Sunday, Radio 4, 3.00pm). Indira Varma stars as the writer considering where women are in the literary canon, what would have happened if Shakespeare had had a sister, and the barriers women face to writing.
This week, Classic FM’s most popular regular show has a new permanent host amid a shake-up of the schedules. While John Suchet moves to present a new weekday concert programme at 8.00pm, the actor and presenter Alexander Armstrong (Monday-Friday, Classic FM, 9.00am) takes over in the mornings.
Pippa Bennett-Warner reads the masterful Booker Prize winning novel by Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (Monday to Friday, Radio 4, 12.00pm).
It is a story of multilayered emotions connecting varied characters to build a picture of contemporary Britain and the wake of Britain’s involvement in the colonial history of Africa and the Caribbean.
The Talking Mongoose (Tuesday, Radio 4, 3.30pm) is a drama documentary about a farmhouse on the Isle of Man in the 1930s, which was said to be home to a talking mongoose called Gef that claimed to be an “earthbound spirit” who lived in the walls and said odd and provocative things – according to the family who lived there, anyway, and their sharpwitted daughter. The trouble started when BBC employee Richard Lambert got involved in covering the case, and a bizarre national scandal ensued.
In What’s Funny About... Blackadder (Wednesday, Radio 4 Extra, 10.30pm), TV comedy executives Peter Fincham and Jon Plowman continue their illuminating project to interview the writers and stars of hit comedy TV series about how they were made, and in this edition the subject is Blackadder, with John Lloyd and Tony Robinson. The discussion focuses on the failure of the first series and how the show moved on to great heights, but also on the way that comedy works in the world of Blackadder, and what happened during the famously poignant final scene of the last series.
In Behind the Scenes (Thursday, Radio 4, 11.30am), Charlotte Jensen meets Michael Armitage, the Kenyan-born painter who has exhibited at Turner Contemporary, the Venice Biennale, MoMA in New York and the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Having trained at the Slade and Royal Academy, his work is inspired by Titian and Manet, while the subjects of his art include the difficult contemporary issues faced by people in East Africa and across the world. Armitage discusses his life, upbringing, and the bark cloth he uses for his paintings, which is traditionally used for burial shrouds.
The whole concept of Desert Island Discs is to imagine complete isolation. Now, many of us have been experiencing exactly that in the real world. In Your Desert Island Discs (Friday,
Radio 4, 9.00am), Lauren Laverne has invited listeners to send in the music that has helped them significantly during the lockdown.
Read The Week in Radio by Charlotte Runcie every Wednesday in
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