In Sunday Feature: Laura Ingalls Wilder (10 December, 6.45pm, Radio 3) Samira Ahmed travels to the Missouri home of the pioneer-girl author who gave us the books from which sprang Little House on the Prairie. Back in the 80s, this was Ronald Reagan’s favourite TV show. On the 150th anniversary of Ingalls Wilder’s birth, Ahmed finds her work is still central to the self-reliance that remains vital to the United States’s self-image. Her legacy is still squabbled over by both sides of the present cultural divide.
Since hearing Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (Weekdays, 10.45pm, Radio 4) I’ve learned the Gail Honeyman book this quirky story comes from is a bestseller. After one hearing I wasn’t in the least surprised. In this version, Tracy Wiles relates the routine of the young woman who works in Accounts Payable, wears the same clothes to work every day, plots a fuddled path through her lonely weekends with the help of two bottles of vodka, living out a life of quiet desperation until exposure to a local singer brings her into unexpected contact with the world of intimate waxing and thrusts her towards the madness that is normal life for her workmates. Brilliant in its way.
This entire Saturday morning is given over to Great Lives: Four Hundred and Counting (9 December, 9am, Radio 4 Extra). Here, Matthew Parris looks back over such highlights as Penelope Keith celebrating Morecambe and Wise, Michael Sheen on Philip K Dick and a grumpy Christopher Hitchens cutting up rough on the presenter. My favourite bit comes at the beginning where you hear Parris give the guests what is presumably his regular pre-record chat. This makes me curious to hear what they say before the red light goes on when recording other favourites.
Thinking Outside the Boxset: How Technology Changed the Story (Thursdays, 11.30am, Radio 4) is an overdue look at how the new ways in which TV and film are distributed in these binge-watching days makes their creators rethink narrative. Because he’s as interested in how people consume as what they consume, Mark Lawson is well qualified to tell this story.
Karina Longworth, the genius behind You Must Remember This, has quite correctly spun off her series about the Sharon Tate murders as a separate podcast called You Must Remember Manson to mark the passing of the man who unleashed hell because he couldn’t get a recording contract. Longworth’s unhurried approach ensures that no matter how much you think you know about the story there’s still a great deal to learn. She does a whole episode about Dennis Wilson’s contacts with the family.
You could say something similar about Slow Burn, a podcast about Watergate. This will be aimed at people who weren’t born when those events took place. I was around at the time and still I listened with mouth agape to the inaugural episode.
