In his Missing Presumed Dead: The Odyssey (Sunday, 3pm, Radio 4) Simon Armitage sites the ancient epic in the modern world. A middling government minister with a controversial past is dispatched to Istanbul to wave a flag at a football international, gets involved in a barney on the wrong side of town, finds himself in the crosshairs of social media and is harried from one end of Europe to another. Thus his personal odyssey begins. This drama, which has one foot in Game Of Thrones and the other in House Of Cards – the sweet spot of 2016 – was originally done for the Liverpool Everyman.
Awards season is upon us. The BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards (Wednesday, 7.30pm, Radio 2) come from the Royal Albert Hall this year, which indicates that somebody has decided their profile needs raising. Mark Radcliffe and Julie Fowlis present a show that features performances from Mark Knopfler, John McCusker and the Unthanks. The night before, The Jazz FM Awards (Tuesday, 9pm, Jazz FM) are hosted by Hardeep Singh Kohli and the guest of honour is Quincy Jones, better known to the younger audience nowadays for being the father of Parks And Recreation’s Rashida. Gregory Porter is also among the garlanded.
“Something’s lost but something’s gained in living every day,” is how Joni Mitchell put it. The book of the week is Respectable (Weekdays, 9.45am, Radio 4), in which Lynsey Hanley describes what was lost and what was gained as life translated her from a large council estate near Birmingham to the world of professional journalism. As she says: “Changing class is like emigrating from one side of the world to the other, where you have to rescind your old passport, learn a new language and make gargantuan efforts if you are not to completely lose touch with the people and habits of your old life, even if they are the relationships and things that are dearest to your heart.”
A Girl Called Jack (Weekdays, 10.45am, Radio 4) is a dramatisation based on the successful cookery book and Cooking On A Bootstrap blog by food writer and activist Jack Monroe. It stars Jaime Winstone as Jack and June Whitfield as the grandmother with whom she shares a kitchen and a testy but ultimately loving relationship.
Why I Changed My Mind (Sunday, 1.30pm, Radio 4) has Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Commission for Racial Equality, talking to Dominic Lawson about how he came to disavow the doctrine of multiculturalism. It’s particularly gripping when he comes to talking about the specifics of the Victoria Climbié case.
“Farming fiction doesn’t come bigger than this,” booms the blurb for the 2012 dramatisation of Far From The Madding Crowd (Wednesday, 10am, Radio 4 Extra) in a reference perhaps to The Archers (Weeknights, 7pm, Radio 4), which promises to keep the Rob and Helen plot line going for at least another year. Fine with me.
