After last week’s mammoth round-up, there’s a shorter list of new stuff to watch out for on radio this week. Of course, ongoing series like Alan Carr’s Comedy Outings are still worth tuning in to, and for many of last week’s items they will still be available on iPlayer for a while.
BBC Electric Proms: Saturday Night Fever Radio 2, Saturday 7.30pm
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of one of the greatest movie soundtrack albums of all time, this concert (part of the BBC Electric Proms season) brings together Bee Gee Robin Gibb with Sam Sparro, Sharleen Spiteri and the BBC Concert Orchestra. It’s likely that this performance will also be available in video at the EP dedicated iPlayer page, where you can also find a fantastic concert by Burth Bacharach featuring Adele and Jamie Cullum.
The Wire: Nowt to Look At Radio 3, Saturday 9.00pm
Valerie Laws writes of Annie (played by Pat Dunn), a disfigured recluse “whose head now floats in a pathology museum jar” in a play about deformity and self-image.
Doctor Who: Max Warp Radio 7, Sunday 6.00pm (repeated midnight)
The second self-contained play in this Paul McGann/Sheridan Smith series is notable mainly for its thinly veiled satire on a certain well-known TV motoring show for petrolheads. Instead of Jeremy, James and the Hamster, we get Graeme Garden, James Fleet and Duncan James. The satire is gentle, but is the best thing about this otherwise slight episode.
Drama on 3: Caligari Radio 3, Sunday 8.00pm
Poet Amanda Dalton adapts the classic German expressionist film Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari for radio. Given that the original film is one of the all-time great silent movies, an audio-only adaptation is intriguing, to say the least.
Stage to Screen: Gypsy Radio 4, Tuesday 1.30pm
Based on the memoirs of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, the role of Gypsy’s mother was created for Ethel Merman — but played on screen by Rosalind Russell. Paul Gambaccini explores the history of the musical, with contributions from Patti LuPone, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents.
Bruce and Sammy Radio 2, Tuesday 10.30pm
Bruce Forsyth presents a personal tribute to Sammy Davis, Jr., the consummate all-rounder whose life was marked by political controversy, racial prejudice and more than his fair share of tragedy. Archive material of Davis’s performances is combined with new interviews with Englebert Humperdinck, Paul Anka, Lionel Blair and Laurie Holloway.
Afternoon Play: Memorials to the Missing Radio 4, Thursday 2.15pm
This rerun of Stephen Graves’ play was scheduled before it was revealed that it has won the Tinniswood Award, for the best original drama broadcast on radio in 2007. According to the judges:
This is a play about burying the dead — primarily the dead soldiers of the First World War, which had an impact on the disposal of corpses of those killed in all subsequent wars. Interestingly it is based on fact, on the efforts of one man, Major General Fabian Ware, to persuade the authorities, against strong opposition from Church and State, to establish cemeteries of identifiable graves for those killed in battle. This led to the establishment of The Imperial War Graves Commission of which Ware was put in charge and for which, again against strong opposition, ecclesiastical and architectural, Sir Edwin Lutyens provided the design plans.
So much for fact. The fiction imagines the voices of dead soldiers, reading their diaries or thinking their thoughts aloud, who seek the recognition of their buried remains by mourning relatives. We hear too the relatives searching for an identifiable place to mourn over their lost loved ones.
This intermingling of fact and fiction makes for a poignant play which is perfect for radio and a play, not without humour, of great emotional power. All the judges privately confessed that it reduced them to tears - and they are no “softies” either!
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