Radio review

Listening to Return to White Horse Village (World Service), presented by Carrie Gracie, you could appreciate why she won the Nick Clarke award last year.

Gracie is one of those reporters who can really get under the skin of a place and tell its stories with great humaneness.

This was the opening programme in a series charting the transformation of a village into a new city in China's vast rural hinterland. Local farmers, Gracie observed, "are losing their rice and maize fields to a new city being built right here". It momentarily seemed idyllic, with Gracie noting "ducks dabble in the rice paddies and cabbage butter-flies flit among the vegetable rows". Even the pigs ate well, from "an enormous steaming wok of sweet potato".

When Gracie peered closer, though, seeing the changes through the fate of one family, things turned fractious and we heard squabbles over jobs and childcare issues. There was just one wrong note in an otherwise impressive documentary: the woman translating the mother, who didn't want to look after her ambitious daughter's children, rather overdid the unsympathetic persona. It was like listening to the Old Woman from Steve Wright's show (Radio 2) cast as the Wicked Witch and wildly overacting.

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