All this week, Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley are reading from their book Deaths Of The Poets as part of Book Of The Week (Weekdays, 9.45am, Radio 4). They start with the famous pre-Raphaelite picture of the poet and forger Thomas Chatterton lying, with arsenic bottle at his side, in his London garret as the sun rises on a day he is not to see. This, they point out, is how the Victorians came to see poets: “Sensitive, tormented, bohemian and dead.” Is this just pigeonholing or is there something about the poet’s calling that particularly demands suffering? They explore this question with reference to Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Dylan Thomas and others.
And The Academy Award Goes To (Saturday 18 February, 10.30am, Radio 4) recalls the year 1951, when Bette Davis’s performance as the viper-tongued Margo Channing in the previous year’s All About Eve was in direct contention with Anne Baxter’s turn as her nubile nemesis Eve Harrington in the same film. It took some nerve on Davis’s part to play a has-been, because that’s exactly what many in Hollywood thought she was at the time. Paul Gambaccini narrates with appropriate relish.
Grace Dent’s The Untold (Weekdays, 1.45pm, Radio 4) tells the story of Kirsty and Zack. One day Zack kissed Kirsty and the children and went off to work. A couple of hours later he texted to say that he wasn’t coming back. Although Zack has a history of a bipolar condition he satisfied the police that he wasn’t in any danger and had left of his own free will. Therefore they can’t help Kirsty, who is understandably distraught. This series was recorded only a week after he left. It begins with Kirsty doing the only thing she can do, walking the streets showing Zack’s photograph to strangers.
Podcasts are big on crime. It’s inexhaustible as a subject and broadcast radio appears to lack the stomach for it. Criminal is presented by Phoebe Judge, who has the knack of being able to recount hair-raising and often chilling stories without leaving you afraid of the dark. Occasionally, as in the recent story about the bodies discovered by an amateur sleuth and her dog, Criminal can be almost cheering. Its subject matter is, after all, the crooked timber of humanity.
Criminal sounds like a proper radio programme. By contrast, before Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark get round to relating the chilling details of this week’s case in My Favourite Murder, they can share as much as 20 minutes of inconsequential chit chat. Eventually, they get round to recounting the story of one of the 15,000 homicides taking place in the US in an average year. The cosiness of the opening exchanges is a perfect counterpoint to the chilliness of the death stories, which are supplemented with listener-supplied “home town murders”. It’s one of those hybrids that just happens to work. Radio wouldn’t dare.
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