...AND THE BEST RADIO
SUNDAY BEATLEJUICE UNION JACK RADIO, 10AM
Beatles superfan and expert Geoff Lloyd starts a 12-part series on the Fab Four (McCartney and Lennon, right), promising a pacy, packed twohour show with live recordings and insider interviews. Expect plenty of the band’s biggest hits, as well as a look at those who influenced the Liverpudlian quartet and their relevance today.
THE EMPIRE RADIO 2, 9.30PM
Indian writer and comedian Anuvab Pal features in his own pilot BBC show set in Darjeeling, India, in 1917, as an assistant district magistrate who has to deal with the arrival of a new, and rather clueless, boss fresh out of Oxford. Stephen Fry is the local Viceroy and Green Wing’s Michelle Gomez plays a scheming local businesswoman.
MONDAY KLARA AND THE SUN RADIO 4, 12.05PM & 10.45PM, MON-FRI
The Nobel prize-winner offers a futuristic vision in his latest novel, in which the titular Klara is an Artificial Friend bought as a companion for a 14-year-old girl with a mysterious illness. Typically restrained, the novel tackles themes of loneliness, the meaning of love and what it means to be human. See Craig Brown review, p72
RADIO 3 LUNCHTIME CONCERT RADIO 3, 1PM
To mark International Women’s Day, Radio 3 gives over its schedule to women composers. In this concert, pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason plays works by Clara Schumann and Sofia Gubaidulina, and there’s the world premiere of Nightscapes 2020 by Natalie Klouda.
DRAMA: THE CHRISTOPHER BOY’S COMMUNION RADIO 4, 2.15PM
The UK premiere of a Faustian drama from the pen of David Mamet (Glengarry Glen
Ross) and directed by Martin Jarvis. In New York, a devout Catholic (Rebecca Pidgeon, Mamet’s wife) embarks on a campaign to free her son from jail as he awaits trial for mutilating the body of his Jewish girlfriend.
WEDNESDAY ALEXEI SAYLE’S THE ABSENCE OF NORMAL RADIO 4, 11.30AM
A series of dark, comic plays adapted by Sayle from his short stories begins with the dilemma of a TV commissioning editor who is incapable of making decisions (clearly, some bitter personal experience here). Then he meets two producers who are determined he will green-light their screenplay.
FRIDAY KEN BRUCE RADIO 2, 9.30AM
Luke Combs has won numerous awards, achieved ten consecutive Billboard Country No 1 singles and beaten Taylor Swift’s record of having a chart-topping album for 24 weeks. He performs from his house in Nashville.
CONSPIRACIES: THE SECRET KNOWLEDGE RADIO 4, 11AM
Everyone loves a conspiracy theory these days. Here, Phil Tinline examines why this has happened and how we can separate baseless theories from real conspiracies by talking to historians and analysts of internet culture.
How many pop stars are there with a PhD? Two come straight to mind: Dr Brian May, the Queen guitarist and expert on zodiacal dust, and Professor Brian Cox, once a member of D:Ream, now the thinking woman’s particle physicist.
There is one musician who did the PhD first – and she’s not even called Brian. Catherine Anne Davies (right), Welsh-born and Aylesbury-bred, published an academic study of American poetry before she released an album.
She’s a self-confessed ‘book nerd’, not that you would know it from her musical persona. As The Anchoress, with her fox-red hair and leopardskin suit, she oozes charisma. When she guests with Simple Minds or Manic Street Preachers, she lights up the stage. Dr Davies is a proper pop star.
She is also a gifted writer, as her titles confirm. Last year, under her real name, she released a record with Bernard Butler, In Memory Of My Feelings. Now comes her second album as The Anchoress, The Art Of Losing – a quote from the poet Elizabeth Bishop. On the lyric sheet every track has a literary epigraph, ranging from Margaret Atwood to Dostoevsky.
In the songs themselves, the bookishness takes a back seat to matters of life and death. Davies wrote them while coping with the loss of her father, multiple miscarriages and cancer (caught early, thankfully). Somehow she translates all t his t rauma i nto memorable music.
The slow numbers are cool, calm, almost classical, as Davies’s delicate piano dances with Tim Bowen’s cello; one haunting instrumental keeps reappearing, like a film t heme. The faster songs are rousing electro-rock, played on vintage synthesisers yet strikingly vi s c e r a l . I f you enjoyed the soundtrack to It’s A Sin – 1980s hits such as Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams and OMD’s Enola Gay – you’re going to love Let It Hurt and Show Your Face. Davies’s voice, like Annie Lennox’s, mixes vulnerability with verve. She gets to the heart of grief, showing it’s not so much five stages as six emotions at the same time. And she turns it into something life-enhancing.