The high spot of this week’s BBC Proms is a performance of what is arguably the first psychedelic orchestral work, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, featuring the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conductor Joshua Weilerstein (19 July, 7.30pm, Radio 3). During the interval, Matthew Sweet chairs a discussion with Richard Davenport-Hines and Dr Daisy Hay about the role of opium in 19th-century Paris at the time the piece was written.
And Then There Were Nun (21 July, 11am, Radio 4) is a cute title for a quietly moving programme about the last few religious communities in the UK, which are closing their doors as the number of people wishing to live as nuns or monks continues its inevitable decline. This leaves the authorities with the challenge of ensuring that elderly and often frail people who have lived their life behind these walls have someone to look after them in their last years. As ever, those who have lived the spiritual life turn out to be the least shockable of interviewees.
Joseph O’Neill’s Booker-nominated novel Netherland is set at the Staten Island Cricket Club, as is When Yorkshire Played New York (19 July, 11am, Radio 4). This is about the 1964 visit of a Yorkshire cricket team charged with bringing the game to the New World, where it had sunk roots in the years before the civil war before losing out to baseball. Yorkshire played the first game, which they lost, on the same night the Beatles played their first US show at the Paramount. Geoffrey Boycott uncharacteristically concedes that Yorkshire weren’t quite as big as the Fabs.
The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (19 July, 2.15pm, Radio 4) returns for a new series based on the latest Alexander McCall Smith book Precious and Grace. The great children’s author and illustrator Shirley Hughes marks her 90th birthday by appearing as Michael Berkeley’s guest in Private Passions (16 July, noon, Radio 3). She chooses music by Scriabin, Mozart, Beethoven and the Beatles.
Half the battle with successful podcasts is in the naming; here the big media owners have a lot to learn from the smaller operators. They Walk Among Us is a case in point. This is a perfect name, because the podcast deals with historical crimes that took place in exactly the kind of streets and suburbs that are familiar to all of us, which is why we feel a certain “there but for fortune” shiver when we hear the details.
They Walk Among Us is the work of husband-and-wife team Benjamin and Rosie. In the past they’ve covered the Shannon Matthews case and the career of the prisoner known as Charles Bronson. Their new series, which starts in mid-July, begins with the story of Peter Manuel, the Scottish-American murderer from the 1950s who was known as “the beast of Birkenshaw”, and will be getting around to the Krays in its own good time.
