The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
CHARLOTTE RUNCIE
RADIO CRITIC
In a world of increasing openness and tolerance, is it still necessary for people who are LGBT to “come out” – or might it be more difficult than ever? Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black charts the history of coming out in Archive on 4: The End of Coming Out? (Saturday, Radio 4, 8.00pm), including the coming out moments of celebrities such as Ian McKellen and Ellen DeGeneres. He speaks to younger people, too, including his husband, the diver Tom Daley.
A new series of The Reunion (Sunday, Radio 4FM, 11.00am) begins this week. After Sue MacGregor stepped down as host after 16 years, Kirsty Wark steps in to chair a discussion between a group of people who were involved in a significant historical moment. This week the subject is Black Wednesday in September 1992, when the collapse of sterling forced Britain’s exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Those featured include the then Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke and
Jim Trott, former chief currency dealer for the Bank of England.
In Laws That Aren’t
Laws (Monday to Friday, Radio 4, 9.30am), comedian Robin Ince presents an intriguing sideways look at the decisions that we make in our lives every day, as he explores five “laws” that we all just sort of know to be true – Murphy’s Law, for instance (anything that can go wrong, will go wrong), and Parkinson’s fundamental law of bureaucracy (work expands to fill the time available).
Between the Ears: Shifts (Tuesday, Radio 3, 10.00pm) is an atmospheric radio response to the pandemic from the point of view of nurses and carers on the front line of healthcare.
The producers interview paramedics and nurses about their experiences and weave them into an impressionistic story of the year so far, with poetry by Stephanie Jacob, a soundscape by Gareth Fry, and music by Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry.
Also on the theme of medicine, in Four Thought (Wednesday, Radio 4, 9.30am), orthopaedic surgeon Sam Gallivan presents a programme of fascinating comparisons between surgery and sculpture. The programme considers the shared importance of a sense of feel, and takes us into the operating theatre with its atmosphere of intense focus. Gallivan presents an argument for surgery as a craft, emphasising “that there are unexpected ways of knowing in medicine that we might not be able to pin down in numbers or statistics”.
Bob Harris, who co-founded Time Out magazine, is a prolific writer and producer, and has been a radio broadcaster for 50 years. The Country Show with Bob Harris (Thursday, Radio 2, 9.00pm) is this week a special celebration of his extraordinary career, as he looks back at his half-century on the radio and plays his favourite songs, with live music from Mary Chapin Carpenter.
And all this week in Culture in Quarantine: Sounds of Silence (Monday to Friday, Radio 3, 10.30pm), musicians are responding to a year of sudden, enforced silence: cities stilled in lockdown, roads emptied of traffic, and theatres and concert venues dark. On Friday the week culminates in a field in Hertfordshire, where singer Jahnavi Harrison explores the call-and-response chanting found in kirtan music, and considers what its collaborative elements could mean for a world post-isolation.
Read The Week in Radio by Charlotte Runcie every Wednesday in
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