The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
On My Wavelength
Marking two decades of the influential awards for female comedians is Archive on 4: 20 Years of Funny Women (Saturday, Radio 4, 8pm), in which Kerry Godliman presents an appetising archive selection of high-quality comedy. Along with the jokes, there are new interviews with Funny Women alumnae Diane Morgan, Zoe Lyons,
Desiree Burch and Jo Brand, and a discussion of how comedy has changed over the last 20 years.
How central is the sound of crowd noise to the experience of watching live football? At the height of the pandemic, when football matches were played without any fans in the stands, the TV viewing experience at home was profoundly altered, and the game felt different: devoid of emotional landscaping and sonic drama. It showed just how inspiring, and intoxicating, crowd noise can be. Between the Ears (Sunday, Radio 3, 6.45pm) celebrates the roar of the crowd, with Mark Burman, Charlie Brooks, Tom Jones and 60,000 Arsenal fans all contributing their voices.
Mathematician Hannah Fry presents a new series, Uncharted (Monday, Radio 4, 1.45pm), about mathematical mysteries and where the explanations behind them lie in looking at the numbers. In the first episode, she looks at 1973, when a higher proportion of boys were born than expected. But the mystery didn’t stop there: in a few specific years across the last century, there was a spike in the numbers of baby boys. Why?
The shadowy mysteries of political campaigning and the intricate machinations that go into the fight to win a general election form the basis of How to Win a Campaign (Tuesday, Radio 4, 9.30am), a new five-part series from Cleo Watson, former Downing Street strategist, adviser to Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings and Vote Leave insider. Watson speaks to some of the other people behind big political campaigns from recent history, on both sides of the political divide, and finds out what they did right, and what went wrong. Contributors include Cummings and political editor of The Guardian, Pippa Crerar.
Book of the Week: GreatUncle Harry: A Tale of War and Empire (Monday to Friday, Radio 4FM, 9.45am) is Michael Palin’s story of his grandfather’s brother who was killed in the First World War. Palin dug into official records and family lore, and eventually walked the same route that Harry took in northern France on the day he was killed, glimpsing the experience in a whole new way. This mixture of biography, history, travelogue and personal memoir is read by the author himself.
Should you be sent to prison for travelling on public transport without a ticket? In Germany, that’s what happens. According to Assignment (Thursday, World Service, 9.30am), 7,000 people are serving a jail sentence for this at any one time. The law is deeply controversial, having originally been introduced by the Nazi government in the 1930s, but transport companies are in favour of keeping it, despite ongoing campaigns to abolish it.
And in The Essay: The Little Secrets of Great Works (Monday to Friday, Radio 3, 10.45pm), five different writers each select a detail from a landmark cultural work and explore its significance. Among the little gems of insight are Sam Leith taking a forensic eye to The Tiger Who Came to Tea, and Elle McNicoll talking about her favourite line in Nora Ephron’s classic romcom, You’ve Got Mail.