The week in radio: Songs of the Sky; Lighting the Beacon; Front Row; The Sleeper and the Spindle

Between the Ears: Songs of the Sky
BBC Radio 3 | BBC Sounds

Slow Radio: Lighting the Beacon
BBC Radio 3 | BBC Sounds

Front Row
BBC Radio 4 | BBC Sounds

Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle
BBC Radio 4 | BBC Sounds

If you are used to relying on the radio for headlines, it’s easy to forget what a transcendent medium it can be. How it can swoop from the massive to the intimate, and melt the concrete into abstraction.

Radio 3’s Light in the Darkness – a season of broadcasts marking the winter solstice and some dark nights of the soul – is a paradoxical case in point. It aims to take us into light by playing us sounds. To open our eyes to starlight, candlelight and fire by teasing our ears. Between the Ears: Songs of the Sky went to the heart of the matter. In Alaska, biologist Karin Lehmkuhl Bodony and composer Matthew Burtner captured the sounds of the northern lights and made them into music earthlings can hear.

There were moments when producer Kate Bissell should have got out her editing shears: “No words can touch the magnitude of the beauty of the cosmos” – oh please, then, don’t finger it with your tongue. Those apart, everything was electrically interesting. The sound of moving across the snow with a dog, in a place unreached by roads but beginning to be reached by grizzlies. The description of a landscape altered by climate change, as riverbanks begin to cast up mammoth bones – and give off the stink of mammoth poo.

Above all, the activity of the northern lights themselves, recorded and reordered. The searing sounds – chirrupings, cracklings, swooshing – reached out as the lights are said to, “spreading like an umbrella”, “ripping through the atmosphere”. Burtner talks of being taken into a dreamspace; local folklore sees in them the trails of ancestors who wait in the sky for their descendants. For a few minutes the imagination seemed to have vocal cords.

Another tribute to illumination: Lighting the Beacon was an episode of Radio 3’s Slow Radio (tribute to a growing phenomenon), which showed the glories and pitfalls of marvelling minute by minute. Catherine Robinson’s programme sprang from the good idea of following signal fires. The capture of these sounds was wonderful: the putt of a match being struck; the flare of fire; the noises that whirl around a lighthouse. The mistake was to add reverentially spoken poetry and prose. Even the excellent Verity Sharp, introducing the podcast version, sounded as if she had been put on the wrong speed by the awe button.

Celebration of the arts can be brisk and practical. As was proved by a vivid edition of Front Row devoted to the resurgence of interest in poetry during the pandemic. In the assured hands of presenter Samira (Hurrah! Equal pay!) Ahmed it was a programme that, apparently conversational, shifted effortlessly through different registers. Simon Armitage talked of the new importance of his study window as he wrote; he then read his terrific poem about talking to a patient through a hospital window. Roger Robinson conjured up poetry as an “empathy machine”. Em Power, a Foyle young poet, spoke with such fluent immediacy that she breathed hope for the future.

And at the end there was a twist: the discovery of 19th-century “vaccine verse” by Robert Southey and by John Williams, who made a strong poetic plea for the global application of Jenner’s smallpox inoculation. Coleridge apparently promised he would write a stanza but never got round to it. Anthony Anaxagorou was commissioned by the programme to compose and read his own Covid ode, which talked of the hands of nurses as “swollen miracles”.

The programme was produced by Julian May, boldest in a gifted band of radio producers keeping the arts in our ears when we can’t go out, and when non-fee-paying schools are being stripped of a commitment to teach them. Another is Allegra McIlroy, whose silvery production of The Sleeper and the Spindle, Neil Gaiman’s fighting fairytale, benefited from the very adult Penelope Wilton as narrator and from Gwendoline Christie as a martial princess. The swift adaptation was by Katie Hims, a vital writer for the radio. Lately she has helped breathe new life into the wheezy Archers. Literally. Hims was responsible for the recent tearful resurrection of the voice of dead Siobhan (Caroline Lennon). First in a spectral series? I’m up for the long-lost tapes of Nelson Gabriel.