Radio 3

Starting with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and his daughter Avril Coleridge-Taylor, we hear music from other families; Clara Schumann, who was coached by her father Friedrich Wieck, and Ravi Shankar with daughters Anoushka Shankar and Norah Jones, who followed in his footsteps. There are famous fictional fathers, from the beloved Mr Bennet to the more daunting father figure in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus and the absent father in The Railway Children. We also hear from precocious daughter Cassandra Mortmain in Dodie Smith's I Capture The Castle and poetry from Helen Mort, who confronts her father's old age, while Virginia Woolf paints a literary portrait of her father Leslie Stephen. Musical extracts include O Mio Babbino Caro from Puccini's Gianni Schicchi, John Alden Carpenter's Adventures in a Perambulator and Debussy's Children's Corner, dedicated to his daughter Claude-Emma. The readers are Sam Dale, who features in a new production of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca soon to be on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds, and Isis Hainsworth, recently on the West End stage in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. Produced in Salford by Jessica Treen Readings: Heritage of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor by Avril Coleridge-Taylor suggested by the biographer Leah Broad