Radio: Sunday Feature | Stark Talk | Danish Noir

Down by the riverside, as the song goes, something big is taking shape. It's Glasgow's £74 million Museum of Transport, due to open next year.

It has been designed by the British domiciled Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, who last month won the prestigious RIBA Stirling prize for her sinuous MAXXI Museum of 21st-century art in Rome.

Hadid is the subject of tomorrow's Sunday Feature, in which architectural commentator Jonathan Glancey looks at her work, which includes the Aquatics Centre for the London Olympics, the Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Arts in Cincinnati and the recent Phaeno Science centre in Wolfsburg, Germany, not to mention her more modestly scaled but strikingly angular Maggie's cancer care centre in Kirkcaldy.

Glancey reports from Wolfsburg, and from Glasgow, where the emerging transport museum, which resembles a giant zig-zag of railway sheds, is seen as an iconic focus for Clydeside regeneration.

In the current economic climate, one can only dream.

Another cross-cultural artistic visionary, Scotland's indefatigable Ricky Demarco, OBE, Cavaliere della Republica d'Italia and much else besides, celebrates his 80th birthday by reminiscing on a life dedicated to contemporary art in Stark Talk.

Meanwhile, if you reckon Danish drama begins and ends with that angst-ridden chappie havering over a skull, think again and tune in to Radio 4's Danish Noir, broadcast over three nights, when Tim McInnerny will read three specially commissioned dark tales from Copenhagen-born journalist and author Heidi Amsinck.

Tuesday's opener, "Last Train to Helsingr", dwells on mysterious happenings in a disused railway siding, while in Wednesday's story, on the day of his retirement a detective is dragged back into it when he is given a new lead on an unsolved murder from three decades earlier.

The last tale, meanwhile, brings us back to Hamlet-style ghostly wailing on the battlements, as Magnus, a castle guide who doesn't believe in spooks, is confronted by a chilling manifestation.

SUNDAY FEATURE

Tomorrow, Radio 3, 9:30pm

Stark talk

Wednesday, Radio Scotland, 3:30pm

DANISH NOIR

Tuesday-Thursday, Radio 4, 3:30pm

This article was first published in The on December 4, 2010