The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
On My Wavelength
Poetry, politics and identity are the big ideas bubbling throughout this week’s radio. In tonight’s edition of The Infinite Monkey Cage (Radio 4, 7.15pm), Brian Cox and Robin Ince consider just how intelligent artificial intelligence actually is. They’re joined by Rufus Hound, Hannah Fry and Kate Devlin to discuss whether our smartphones might soon be smarter than us.
For the first in a new suite of four episodes of Poetry Please (Sunday, Radio 4, 4.30pm), regular presenter Roger McGough is joined by fellow poet Benjamin Zephaniah for a discussion of verse that spans history and theme, from John Clare and Percy Bysshe Shelley, to the strikingly different tone of Spike Milligan. There’s also a poem about Cambridge written by Zhimo Xu and a poem about hedgehogs written by Zephaniah himself.
Mike O’Sullivan, academic and expert in investment management, presents Waking Up To World Debt (Monday, Radio 4, 8pm).
The key question is, what if our governments have already borrowed so much that when the next major disaster comes along, we won’t be able to borrow our way out of that one? And which nations are likely to be worst hit?
The writer Candice Brathwaite is marking two years since Barbados announced its decision to remove the British monarch as its head of state and become a republic. Two years on, how much has changed in terms of everyday life for the people of Barbados? In We the People Are Barbados (Tuesday, World Service, 9.30am), a reflective discussion of the country’s identity since its independence on November 30 1966, Brathwaite builds a picture of the nation today by speaking to the island’s Poet Laureate, Esther Phillips, historian Dr Pedro Welch, artist Oneka Small, journalist Krystal-Penny Bowen, and socio-economics expert Professor Don Marshall.
It’s officially the run up to Christmas. The BBC’s annual series of four Reith Lectures (Wednesday, Radio 4, 9am) is back, and led this time around by Ben Ansell, Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Nuffield College, Oxford University. He’s starting big: this first one is called Our Democratic Future. Best to tune in, then...
In January 2022, on the border between Poland and Belarus, the Polish government began building a wall with the intention that it would stop migrants entering Poland, and therefore the European Union, illegally. It has reduced the number of people crossing at that point, but what other effects have there been?
For Assignment: Poland’s Forest Frontier (Thursday, World Service, 9.30am), Grzegorz Sokol explores the 186km stretch of five-metrehigh wall, designed to keep humans out at all costs, and which, coincidentally, manages to cut right through a Unesco world heritage site: the primeval Białowieża forest.
And in The Verb (Friday,
Radio 3, 10pm), Ian McMillan interviews one of the most prolific and internationally renowned poets and authors writing in English: Joyce Carol Oates, who, at the age of 85, has written dozens of novels (including Blonde, about Marilyn Monroe) and collections of poems and stories, as well as essays, plays and criticism. She joins McMillan to discuss her career in the light of her most recent publication, the short-story collection Zero-Sum, which explores twisted contemporary values, erotic obsessions and toxic idealism.