LA STUPENDA!
Radio 3, 7.30pm
Joan Sutherland may have actually turned 80 on November 7, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy Martin Handley’s evening of tributes to her now. At the centre of all the festivities is an interview with La Stupenda herself, in which she looks back at a long (she sang her last opera in her mid-sixties) career. Chuck in reminiscences and appreciations by a world of admirers and colleagues — as well as her husband, the conductor Richard Bonynge — and rarely will an evening have sped by so swiftly on a magic carpet of song and stories.
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THE Q CAMP
Radio 4, 11am
Today’s televisual Brat Camps, in which horrible children are sent off to the middle of nowhere to learn how to be nice ones, are nothing new. Why, during the Second World War there was Q Camp, set up to house those urban evacuees deemed too feral to be placed with innocent rural families. Recently released Home Office files reveal a remarkable story of success under duress, where accommodation and facilities were meagre at best, but where the inmates grew up healthy on a diet of fresh air, exercise, cold water and vegetables. Pity about the Lord of the Flies overtones to the discipline . . .