The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
On my wavelength
Acreaking door. The rumble of crowd noise. A crunching footstep. Composer and sound designer Sarah Angliss considers the enduring power of the sound effect in Knock Knock: 200 Years of Sound Effects (Saturday, Radio 4, 8pm). Sound effects are vital to radio, of course, but also crucial for bringing film, theatre and TV programmes to life. Taking inspiration from Thomas De Quincey’s essay on the infamously foreboding knock on the door in Macbeth, Angliss hears how sound effects work, and the effect they have on us.
The Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, returns with his intimate and reflective radio interview series, The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His
Shed (Sunday, Radio 4, 4.30pm), conducted in his wooden shed in the Pennine hills. In this first of eight episodes, he speaks to
Ian McKellen about portraying the character of Gandalf, memorising Shakespeare, and getting a tattoo in Elvish.
Understand: The Economy (Monday to Friday, Radio 4,
1.45pm) returns with Felicity Hannah promising to de-mystify how the economy works for most of us in daily life, breaking down jargon and explaining what terms – such as inflation, GDP, energy markets and National Debt – mean. In this episode, Hannah talks about pricing and discounting with Rupal Patel, an economist at the Bank of England, and Dr Victoria Bateman from the University of Cambridge.
Word of Mouth (Tuesday,
Radio 4, 4pm) provides an interesting complement to Sunday’s programme on sound effects. Streaming services are increasingly prioritising the art of subtitles, making sure that words match what the programme is trying to convey – however abstract or bizarre. Michael Rosen speaks to Karli Witkowska, the subtitler behind hits such as Netflix’s Stranger Things, who explains how descriptions such as “tentacles wetly squelching” enhance the experience for us all.
A new series of Sideways (Wednesday, Radio 4, 4pm), Matthew Syed’s radio exercise in lateral thinking, begins, asking the question of when in life we can expect to reach the peak of our mental ability (personally, I’m hoping for mine any day now). Alas, the focus here is on the phenomenon of the child prodigy, and Syed considers the life of John Nunn, a gifted mathematician who learned to play chess at the age of four.
It’s not quite Valentine’s Day yet, but Radio 4 is already kicking off the romance theme with Cupid Loves Eros (Thursday, Radio 4, 11.30am), a documentary exploring queer love poetry. Crime writer Val McDermid presents, with contributions from Stephen Fry, Jackie Kay and Neil Bartlett.
They select their favourite poems about same-sex love from Ancient Greece to today, with works by Sappho, Aphra Behn, Carol Ann Duffy and Frank
O’Hara, among others.
And all this week on The Essay: Stories to Keep Space for on the Bookshelves (Monday to Friday, Radio 3, 10.45pm), this year’s
New Generation Thinkers choose authors that they think deserve more attention. Expect an introduction to Olivia Wenzel and her exploration of queer family life; the African-American poet, abolitionist and women’s rights activist Frances E W Harper; the government adviser who warned of nuclear threat, Philip Wylie; and the prolific 19th-century author, Charlotte M Yonge. You might just find a new favourite.