‘By the time we got to the pudding, the losses amounted to £900,000.” That’s art critic Martin Gayford laconically recollecting a lunch with the painter Lucian Freud, who was having a bet at the same time. Freud liked a wager. He reckoned he could carry £16,000 cash about his person without it becoming obvious. The first of three programmes called The Gamble (18 October, 9am, Radio 4) investigates the connection between risk and the creative arts. In Freud’s case, his assistant remembers: “He would gamble until he had nothing left and that somehow freed him up to then start painting again.”
Radio 3’s Opera Season continues with an Afternoon Concert devoted to Nabucco (19 October, 2pm, Radio 3) recorded at Covent Garden in 2003. Plácido Domingo plays the King of the Babylonians, Liudmyla Monastyrska is Abigaille. Because this was taped during a performance you can hear the sandals of each and every Hebrew slave as they seem to shuffle through the room.
Meanwhile in The Essay: Stories That Sing (Weekdays, 10.45pm, Radio 3) five prominent creatives talk about how they came to grips with the one musical genre that many people consider a step too far. Julian Barnes goes first on Monday night. He’s followed by academic and novelist Patricia Duncker, actor David Threlfall, writer Rachel Cooke and poet and critic Garth Greenwell. In Late Junction (Tuesday, 11pm, Radio 3) Verity Sharp travels to Lincolnshire to talk to Robert Wyatt about his musical preferences, which include early jazz, Ivor Cutler and Peter Pears but do not stretch to what he calls the “wobbly singers” of opera.
Why Music? The Key to Memory (15 October, 10pm, Radio 3 and 6 Music) is a live show, simulcast across two networks. It’s presented by Tom Service and Cerys Matthews and comes from the Wellcome Collection as part of a weekend of events exploring the implications of music’s unique capacity to be remembered. A live audience and the listeners at home are invited to see if they can pass the “plink” test, where recognising a song from its first half-second can apparently show your age.
If, like me, you’ve never watched Game of Thrones, the podcast Binge Mode: Game of Thrones ought to be unlistenable. It isn’t, thanks to the energy of the two expert presenters Mallory Rubin and Jason Concepcion, who have the wit to laugh at their own deep-dive devotion and are helped out by some smart editing.
Now that she’s being seriously talked up as a presidential candidate, Making Oprah is an important listen, even though the show stopped broadcasting in 2011. The producers modestly bill this as “the inside story of a TV revolution”. Unsurprisingly, there are episodes devoted to Oprah’s interest in politics and spirituality. Because this is about TV, the episode devoted to her hair is every bit as instructive.
