The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
On My Wavelength
The presence of Sting and Stephen Tompkinson will attract attention to I Must Have Loved You (Saturday, Radio 4, 2.45pm), a musical drama by Michael Chaplin – with songs by Sting – about the pop-star daughter of an embittered Newcastle bluesman (Sting), whose disappearance is raked up again by a journalist. Save time today too for documentary Lines of Duty (Radio 4, 8pm), the engrossing tale of how a civil service whistleblower called Reg saved a swathe of Britain’s rail routes. Toby
Jones reads Reg’s previously unpublished account of the events.
A vividly entertaining reworking of George Eliot’s great “study of provincial life”, Middlemarch Monologues (Sunday, Radio 3, 7.30pm) credibly updates Eliot’s characters and concerns to a present-day setting. Dorothea becomes Thea, an idealist who falls for pompous activist “Cass”. Lydgate is an over-worked NHS doctor, while Rosamond becomes Rosanna, a seductive social-media influencer. Fans will enjoy the clever mirroring of past and present.
Sophie Okonedo and Mark Rylance pair up again for Song of the Reed (Monday, Radio 4, 2.15pm), the last of Steve Waters’s haunting quartet of urgent environmental dramas recorded on location at a wildlife reserve. Ian (Rylance) returns after suffering injury during the winter flood and sets about helping Liv (Okonedo) to keep the reserve going. As ever, the natural sounds of Norfolk’s RSPB Strumpshaw wetlands play a major role – this time via the boom of the bittern.
Are the UK’s police forces guilty of institutional misogyny? In Bad Apples (Tuesday, Radio 4, 8pm), following revelations of toxic behaviour among Met officers, Telegraph journalist Cara McGoogan investigates wider claims of bullying and violence towards female officers in police forces outside London. Some of her discoveries make shocking listening, as serving officers speak of harassment, emotional abuse and sexual assault by colleagues. It’s a problem that goes far beyond a few “bad apples” insists one former chief constable.
The wonderful Jim Broadbent delivers a poignant performance in Norman Bows Out (Wednesday, Radio 4, 2.15pm) as a fading pantomime star who revives his once-celebrated ventriloquism act and takes his dummy, Willy, on the road for one last tour. A turn sees him confined to bed, with only his theatrical landlady Betty (Christine Kavanagh) for company – until Norman’s volatile and unsympathetic lover, Kenny
(Tom Glenister), turns up.
In The Night Tracks Mix (Thursday, Radio 3, 11pm), Hannah Peel presents a mix of music from last weekend’s After Dark Festival in Gateshead. The centrepiece is a performance by the Royal Northern Sinfonia of John Luther Adams’s hymn to the landscapes of Alaska, Dream in White on White. In Unclassified, which follows at 11.30pm, Elizabeth Alker presents highlights from Kinbrae, Darkstar and Christian Löffler.
Scottish crime writer Val McDermid describes her semiautobiographical drama The Road and the Miles to Dundee (Friday, Radio 4, 2.15pm) as a queer tale of avoiding love on the rebound. It’s about a famous writer, Stella (Louise Oliver), who has long been haunted by a song her father sang. After a break-up, she bumps into Jen (Susannah Laing) and they hit it off. But can Stella shake off the past? With songs by Barbara Dickson.