The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
On My Wavelength
Awinter Saturday night at home is the perfect opportunity for some sumptuous opera, such as Handel’s Ariodante (Saturday Radio 3, 6.30pm), recorded at the Royal Opera House last week. Set in medieval Scotland and based on the same story as Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing,
Ariodante tells of a prince driven to despair by a false accusation of his loved one’s infidelity.
In Sunday Feature: The Fake Poet (Sunday, Radio 3, 6.45pm), Sophie Coulombeau discusses the poetry famously written by a teenager 250 years ago: the fascinating and precocious
Thomas Chatterton. He was born in 1752, published poems that he passed off as having been written by a fictional medieval poet, and was a significant influence on Romantics including Shelley,
Keats and Wordsworth. Chatterton died by suicide when he was 17, but his story captivated the arts world and was memorialised in poetry, novels, operas and paintings.
I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue (Monday, Radio 4, 6.30pm) returns for a bittersweet new series. The first two episodes feature the final contributions of the great Tim Brooke-Taylor, who died in April after contracting Covid-19. From Huddersfield Town Hall, BrookeTaylor joins Rachel Parris, Tony Hawks and Marcus Brigstocke, to be given silly things to do.
NatureBang (Tuesday, Radio 4, 9.30am) returns to explore the latest scientific research into nature’s weird and wonderful side. First, presenters Becky Ripley and Emily Knight celebrate the intelligence of a brainless slime mould. (Insert your own political jokes here.) As single-cell protists, with no brain and no nervous system, slime moulds do not “think” in human terms, but they can calculate and navigate complex systems, challenging our definitions of intelligence. Featuring biologist Merlin Sheldrake and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats.
Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England, delivers The Reith Lectures 2020 (Wednesday, Radio 4, 9am). Across four lectures exploring the differences and links between financial value and human value, he argues that this uncertain relationship has contributed to crises in credit, Covid-19 and climate, and makes suggestions for the future. The first looks at deep issues underpinning the economy: how do the valuations of markets affect the values of our society?
Nobody does cosiness in the winter better than the Danes, and comfort and contentment feel more important than ever. And so Britain’s favourite Dane, Sandi Toksvig, presents Sandi Toksvig’s Hygge (also Wednesday, Radio 4, 6.30pm), a celebration of how the Danish find joy and the comfort of hygge in dark times. She invites guests to grab a favourite jumper and join her to share what brings them a sense of hygge, in this cockle-warming new series.
The writer Kenneth Steven explores how the Scottish Highlands were changed forever by the arrival of road and canal routes in The Essay: New Ways Through the Glens (Monday to Friday, Radio 3, 10.45pm). On Thursday he considers the highly ambitious project to build a canal through the Highlands along the Great Glen, to link east and west.
And the writer Cole Moreton is the father of triplets – his children Ruby, Josh and Grace are about turn 18. In The Power of Three (Friday, Radio 4, 11am) Moreton tells of the family’s early years of joy, as well as the extreme and often overwhelming challenges.