Radio diary

Press, 23 October 1989, Page 15

Radio diary

By JAMES HOMES Ella Fitzgerald in Concert, National Radio 2.05 this afternoon, offers good listening for Labour Day. Fitzgerald sang without a break for nearly 90 minutes at this Edinburgh concert, backed by the Brian Fahey Concert Orchestra and the Jimmy Rowles Trio, and the audience loved every minute. Settle back in your armchair, or take your tranny outside if the day is sunny, but don’t miss.

Scandal and boredom in Soundings, Plains FM 7 this evening, in conversations from the North Carolina National Humanities Centre. Sarah Maza discusses gender and sexuality in French revo-

lutionary culture, and Patricia Meyer Spacks looks at boredom as a cultural phenomenon. Repeated next Saturday at noon.

Twelve-year-old Charles Dickens went to work labelling boot-polish bottles when his family hit hard times, and his experience greatly influenced his later life and work. Writer Tom Vernon tells of Dickens’s childhood in The Boy from the Blacking Factory, National Radio 8.05 this evening. Alan Badel plays the young Dickens. Vernon 1 uses Dickens’s own writings.

Gddtack to the days of the colonial East in Tales from the South China

Seas, National Radio 8.05 Wednesday evening. Recorded memories of old South China hands — onetime colonial civil servants, soldiers, policemen, planters and merchants. Music and special effects carry the narrative.

Thirteen Rachmaninov Preludes Opus 32 made up the second half of a recital by English pianist Peter Donohoe in Wellington earlier this year. A recording of the performance can be heard on the Concert Programme at 8 on , Wednesday evening. Donohoe, described as “one of today’s most passionately convincing advocates for Rachmaninov,” will play at next war’s International Festival of the Arts.