The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
On My Wavelength
The BBC’s former North America business correspondent, Stephen Evans, was working on the ground floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001. When the planes hit, he made it to a telephone and immediately became the BBC’s main reporter on the scene. For Archive on 4: Escaping 9/11 (today, Radio 4, 8pm), marking two decades since the terrorist attacks, Evans revisits an interview with Herman Belderok, recounting his own dramatic escape from the 73rd floor, and plays it to Belderok’s daughter for the first time. There are also interviews with paramedic Scott Buell, who was on the scene and lost his best friend, a police officer, when the towers collapsed; and ham radio operators who played a crucial role in setting up emergency communications for the search and rescue effort.
The summer over, Desert
Island Discs (Sunday, Radio 4FM, 11am) returns for a new series. Cricketer Michael Holding selects the eight pieces of music, book and luxury item that he would take to a desert island. The great pace bowler has more recently become well known for his honest opinions on the subject of racism, and his criticisms of T20 cricket.
Allan Little presents This Union: Two Kingdoms (Monday, Radio 4, 8pm), a three-episode series on how and why Scotland entered into union with England in 1707, and how the relationship between the two countries has changed. As a BBC correspondent, Little has witnessed independence movements and the emergence of new states across the world, including in the Balkans and Africa. But Scotland is his home, and he turns his global experience to look at the history and possible futures of the United Kingdom.
We’re often told that electric cars are the future. But is the UK really ready for them? Peter Curran was an early adopter, having gone on an electricpowered tour of Britain 10 years ago. Now, in Electric Ride UK (Tuesday, Radio 4FM, 11am), he travels from Land’s End to John O’Groats to find out just how prepared we are to embrace a world without petrol.
Sex and stereotypes are the themes of the new series of Bringing Up Britain (Wednesday, Radio 4, 8pm), in which Anjula Mutanda sets out to discover how much stereotypes matter, how to prepare boys for adolescence, the pros and cons of single-sex education, and how to help children navigate the modern online world, protecting them as much as possible.
A new series of In Our Time (Thursday, Radio 4, 9am) begins ready for the new university term (students, apparently, make up a big proportion of its listenership
– though all of us can learn something new). The theme is crocodiles and their evolution. Crocodiles’ ancestors predate the age of the dinosaurs, and were diverse, too; some could run on two legs, and some were the size of a bus. Everyone loves dinosaurs, but have we neglected the fascinating crocodile?
And Book of the Week: God: An Anatomy (Monday to Friday, Radio 4FM, 9.45am) is Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s study of the physical shape of a monotheistic God, often seen as shapeless and formless, but, she argues, actually with significant theological precedent as a tangible, corporeal presence in the same image as man: “A supersized, musclebound, good-looking God, with supra-human powers and earthly passions”. Amen to that.