The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Gerard O’Donovan On My Wavelength
Atreat for fans of folk and roots music today on Music Planet (Radio 3, 4pm) with a fabulous concert recorded at the Celtic Connections Festival a fortnight ago, when the Orkney band Fara got together with Quebecois legends Genticorum – and guest musicians from as far afield as New York, Syria, Mali and Benin – to raise the roof at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Plus, a particularly entertaining edition of The Infinite Monkey Cage (Radio 4, 7.15pm) with comedian Alan Davies among those striving to convince a sceptical Professor Brian Cox that science and magic make a perfect pairing.
Kavita Puri’s superb, if desperately sad, series Three Million (Sunday, Radio 4, 1.30pm) tackles the difficult subject of the 1943 Bengal Famine, in which three million Indian people died of starvation while the Second World War raged on. It’s a divisive story that Puri approaches in similar eye-witness style – and with the same concern for balance – as her award-winning Partition Voices. On a lighter note, Lauren Laverne welcomes Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell to Desert Island Discs (Radio 4, 11.15am).
You’ll need to be wide awake for Book of the Week: Ritual (Monday to Friday, Radio 4FM, 9.45am), anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas’s engrossing new work tipping current belief about the “birth of civilisation” – and much else – on its head. The arguments come thick and fast in Monday’s opener, read by Robert Jack, in which Xygalatas outlines his theory that the need humans feel to engage in ritualistic activity is a deep-rooted evolutionary urge that predates most traditional hallmarks of civilisation.
Toxic masculinity gets a historical outing in drama A Tsar in London (Tuesday, Radio 4, 2.15pm). It imagines a youthful Peter the Great coming to London in 1698 to learn the craft of shipbuilding, and his roistering Russian ways putting genteel noses out of joint, including that of his host John Evelyn (Michael Bertenshaw). Elsewhere, fans of Top Gear and The Grand Tour might cock an ear to podcast Who We Are Now (Tuesday, Global), in which Richard Hammond gets to grips with modern masculinity and mental health, with the help of his co-host (and daughter) Izzy.
Research suggests that more girls experience mental health problems than boys, particularly in their late teens, when rates of eating disorders and self-harm peak. In All in the Mind (Wednesday, Radio 4, 3.30pm) Claudia Hammond visits King’s College London, where a team have been conducting a major study into young people’s mental health for almost a decade.
Spreading the word is the focus of Free Thinking (Thursday, Radio 3, 10pm), in particular those so skilfully laid down by the fabulously monikered Wynken de Worde, a 15th-century Dutchman who came to London to work with print pioneer William Caxton and found renown as England’s first master typographer.
For those of us of a certain age, few voices are as instantly recognisable as that of actor Richard Thomas, who played
John Boy Walton in The Waltons. The warm nostalgia hit that it delivers is just one good reason to listen to a rare repeat of the wonderfully evocative Goodnight John Boy (Friday, Radio 4 Extra, 8pm), in which writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce brings together insights from cast members and the series’ late, great creator Earl Hamner to explore The Waltons’ wide-reaching cultural legacy.