The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
On My Wavelength
What was music like during Nazi rule? The Documentary (Saturday, World Service, 12.06pm), presented by historian Shirli Gilbert, features rare recordings that give a sense of the soundtrack to life under the power of the Nazis, including secret sessions by Jewish musicians and record labels, as well as various pieces and composers that were accepted in the mainstream.
Janice Long: A Life in Music (Sunday, Radio 2, 7pm) is a tribute to the radio presenter, who died on Christmas Day. It’s studded with contributions from dozens of admirers, demonstrating just how well-respected and beloved a figure she was. Zoe Ball presents a celebration of the broadcaster who made her mark on Radio 1 and Top of the Pops, with contributors including Paul McCartney, remembering his “old Liverpool mate”; Elvis Costello praising
Long as a master interviewer; and a plethora of colleagues recalling her sense of mischief and infectious passion for music.
In 1922: The Birth of Now (Monday to Friday, Radio 4, 1.45pm), Matthew Sweet begins a series of 10 programmes exploring the world of a century ago, and how it gave rise to the cultural landscape we know today. He starts off by considering a 1922 revolution in architecture alongside other cultural landmarks of the time, including TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.
The Essay: Unearthing Britannia’s Tribes (Monday to Friday, Radio 3, 10.45pm) invites a selection of writers to consider the people who long preceded us in these islands, from warrior queens of the Iron Age to Lindow Man. On Tuesday, Scottish playwright
David Greig meets the marshdwelling Maeatae, who inhabited Scotland’s Ochil Hills during the Roman rule of the second and third centuries AD, and recalls a ghostly encounter with them during a starlit run in their territory, and on Wednesday Professor Ronald Hutton considers the mysterious and heroic Druids.
The Coming Storm
(Wednesday, World Service, 11.30am) is Gabriel Gatehouse’s scintillating series about the QAnon conspiracy theory and its long roots threaded through the last 30 years of American politics and culture. It’s available in full via BBC Sounds, but is also being broadcast weekly as a series on the World Service. Either way, it’s not one to be missed: conspiracies, corruption, paranoia, fake news and the dark recesses of the internet are all explored with power and insight.
What’s the relationship between artists and the makers who assist them? The artist Scottee explores that idea in Taxi Drivers (Thursday, Radio 4, 11.30am), building on a comment from the late painter Lucian Freud, who once described himself as a passenger who knows where he wants to go and his printmaker as the driver who knows how to get him to his destination. Is the idea of the lone artistic genius a myth? There are contributions on the subject from artists and makers including Antony Gormley and his foundry manager, Mick Booth.
And are terrorists mentally ill? In Terrorism and the Mind (Friday, Radio 4, 11am), Raffaello Pantucci explores what we know, and what is still unknown, about the links between mental illness and the actions of violent extremists. Across three episodes he considers how police, psychiatrists and intelligence agencies are changing their understanding of what motivates people to carry out such attacks.