Radio 3’s annual Free Thinking festival takes place at the Sage in Gateshead this weekend and many of the regular shows are broadcasting from the pop-up studio in the foyer overlooking the Tyne. These include Alyn Shipton’s Jazz Record Requests (Saturday, 4pm, Radio 3) and Words and Music (Sunday, 5.30pm, Radio 3) with Samuel West, Kim Gerard and an ensemble from the Northern Sinfonia presenting a programme inspired by the festival’s overarching theme, The Speed of Life. There are lots of excellent discussions and performance sessions taking place over the whole weekend for broadcast in subsequent weeks. Go in person if you can. Listen if you can’t.
The annual 6 Music festival begins in Scotland next week with acts including Goldfrapp, Depeche Mode and the Shins. In the run-up to the event two venerable Scottish musicians present their own shows. That’s Edwyn Collins (Sunday, 2pm, 6 Music) and Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian (Sunday, 4pm, 6 Music), each playing two hours of their favourite music.
Cardinal Burns Presents Dean and Murf (Wednesday, 10.30pm, Radio 2) is a spinoff from their Channel 4 comedy series. Dean and Murf are two superannuated ravers who live on a houseboat on the Regent’s Canal and are trying to keep their heads above water without doing anything much like work. The show’s targets include Loaded magazine and a splendidly sinister Ken Loach. If this turned up late at night on Radio 4 you wouldn’t be surprised. To have the world of Withnail and I colliding with the comfy world of Radio 2 is more surprising.
One of the reasons why Here’s The Thing, Alec Baldwin’s series of podcasts with “artists, policymakers and performers”, is so good is because he’s a big name so the guests have to deliver. His subjects, who include everyone from Julie Andrews to Questlove, have a natural tendency to rise to the challenge and often discuss questions of money and status that they would never talk about with somebody who wasn’t in the business. There’s something of the hard candour of the audition room about it.
You Must Remember This, the podcast about “the secret and/or forgotten history of Hollywood’s first century”, has a thread dedicated to Dead Blondes, which is a clue to where it’s coming from. Here, you can find the stories of the sadly forgotten Peg Entwistle alongside the half-remembered Carole Landis and the legendary Jean Harlow. They’re doing Marilyn Monroe at the moment. In multiple parts, as you might expect. These life stories are written and read by Karina Longworth, whose delivery is reminiscent of the moment in every classic film where one character gazes into the middle distance, says “I remember the day we first met”, the screen begins to swim and the flashback begins. This is always the best bit.
