Aaaaaaand they're only two months late.
Don’t ask,
just go with it.
See the
caveat from last year:
As with last
year, I will not apologize for these being completely subjective selections,
and I reserve the right to present “cumulative” awards much in the way Oscars are
sometimes awarded for a body of work rather than for a specific nominated
performance (despite the rules to the contrary). Also, given the nature of the way I listen,
to call these categories “of the Year” would be deceptive as many of the Radio
4 Extra performances are from as long ago as four decades in the past. With these caveats out of the way, we’ll
proceed—and in no particular order.
Outstanding Performers
What a long list I’ve got.
In no particular order . . .
Luke Thompson
Luke Thompson appeared in two plays at the very beginning of
2017 (well, technically speaking, the very end of 2016, but I only heard them
in 2017) and then disappeared off the radar.
He was excellent, really the best thing in The Shepherd and the new adaptation of Northanger Abbey as Henry Tilney (who is, after Frederick
Wentworth, and perhaps Colonel Brandon, probably my favorite of the Austen
heroes). Thompson really stretched his
acting prowess playing all the roles in The
Shepherd, a seasonal drama based on a story by Frederick Forsyth. He got to be altogether more camp for Northanger Abbey but fortunately didn’t
take things too flippantly. He made
Henry Tilney very attractive indeed.
Anna Massey
I discovered the late Anna Massey quite a way into her
formidable career (first hearing her as Madame Giry in Big Finish’s quite good
adaptation of Phantom of the Opera in
2008). I also heard her in the clever Dear Writer in 2011, in which she
played an acerbic writer. In 2016, I was spellbound hearing her in the title role
of Vampirella (1976), Angela
Carter’s fantastic drama about Dracula’s daughter. (One of my favorite radio dramas of all
time—up until that point, I’d only ever read the script.) In 2017, however, I
got to be bowled over by a performance par
excellence in Spine Chilllers-
Figures by Colin Haydn Evans. This
beautifully written and very creepy drama originally from 1984 hinged on the
convincing and cold-as-steel performances from Massey as Anne, who has just
moved into a haunted house with her daughter, and Blain Fairman as her
sympathetic neighbor Dr Alex. I’ve no doubt Anna Massey was brilliant in all
her radio work.
Annette Badland
I liked Annette Badland as the villainous yet sympathetic
Margaret Blaine (Slitheen) from Doctor
Who in 2005, but had never seen her in anything else. She was fantastic in the very enjoyable
series DI Gwen Banbury, An Odd Body by
Sue Rodwell. I never warmed to the
too-flippant incidental music in this series, but I enjoyed everything
else. The first series was made in 1994. DI Danbury and her mother Joan are fantastic
roles, and it is really incredibly refreshing for a larger, middle-aged woman
and her sexagenarian mother to be the leads in a series of any kind (even if
it’s just on radio). The hint of a
romance with Gwen’s subordinate Sergeant Henry Jacobs was never
overpowering. Once the jokes about Gwen
being tubby and still living with her mother were got out of the way, we could
enjoy some excellent stories with excellent characters. Gwen’s father was a policeman, so her mother
is a natural (if sometimes obtrusive) ally in her investigations. I did keep forgetting this was 1994 until
they kept mentioning WPCs; naturally, just a few years after Prime Suspect, the fact that the DI was
a woman was a major step forward. Joan
was originally played by Gudrun Ure and then in the 2002 series by Stephanie
Cole. The second series was slightly
less serious than the first. Quite
obviously, the whole thing just wouldn’t have gone if not for the tirelessly
human performance from Badland.
Robert Glenister
The first radio drama I knowingly heard Robert Glenister in
was the adaptation of Susan Hill’s The
Woman in Black from 1993, in which he played Arthur Kips. I loved this adaptation so much that I read
the book, saw the stage play, and watched the movie in teeth-chattering
delight. Since then, I have heard him often on radio. Apparently, I listened to Bruce Bedford’s
far-out, time-traveling fantasy epic The
Bedford in 2010 as well as in 2017; it’s uneven to say the least, but
Robert Glenister positively blazed in his performance as Saul, the hapless Poet
of Bath. He gave an enigmatic
performance as the eponymous Grigory
Efimovich Rasputin – Almost the Truth, an unusual tale from Wally K Daly
from 1996. He was, however, at his best, searing but understated, in the
excellent play by Peter Wolf from 2001, Ghost
on the Moor, in which he played Graeme, a scarred, retiring, semi-literate
northerner who is struggling to put the past to rest.
Philip Glenister
While his brother Robert has been a fixture on BBC Radio,
2017 was the first time in which I heard Philip Glenister in radio roles, both
of them fantastic. In South Riding by Winifred Holtby,
dramatized by Gill Adams in 1999, he played the complex Robert Carne, a source
of fascination and frustration to the heroine, Sarah Burton, played with aplomb
by Sarah Lancashire. South Riding took awhile to get into,
but I’m glad I stuck with it. While at
first, Carne as a haughty gentleman farmer seemed more Darcy than anything else,
he is nuanced, a role in which Glenister can stretch his acting chops. However,
previous to this, Glenister knocked my socks off in an adaptation of Peter
Ackroyd’s The House of Doctor Dee. Glenister
was absolutely sublime as the mysterious Matthew Palmer, who finds upon his
father’s death that he has inherited a bizarre Tudor house in Clerkenwell. After some digging, he finds out that the
house belonged originally to Dr Dee. For
me—as for many, I suspect—Philip Glenister will always be identified with DCI
Gene Hunt. BBC Radio’s loss was
television’s gain.
Lee Ross
I know I chose Lee Ross last year as well for his work in Tommies, but I couldn’t help it—he was
doing great radio work in 2017, too.
Despite Mickey Bliss’ fading fortunes in 1917, Ross was still playing
the role superbly—particularly in the 17
April 1917 episode, which as an emotional rollercoaster to say the
least. Furthermore, he was fantastic in I Confess by EV Crowe, playing the role
of the charming psychopath with chilling brilliance.
Toby Jones
I’m beginning to see that Toby Jones, too, is a perennial
BBC Radio player, often a brilliant one.
I was very impressed by his performance in the black comedy/mockumentary
by Peter Strickland, The Len
Dimension. Set in the early ‘80s, Len
is a struggling actor with delusions of grandeur. Self-absorbed and abrasive, Len alienates
everyone around him. Jones does this
without alienating the audience; I found parts of this play to be
laugh-out-loud funny.
Clare Corbett
Clare Corbett, too, is frequently to be heard in BBC Radio
drama. Yet she is extremely
versatile. She was fantastic in Simon
Bovey’s 2006 The Voice of God as Sam
Rideout, the somewhat naïve seismologist who stumbles onto weapons of mass
(sonic) destruction. She had a small but
memorable role in Stephen Wakelam’s Lying
Low, about Samuel Beckett in 1959, but she outdid herself in Philp Palmer’s
terrific Cold War thriller, Foreign
Bodies: Keeping the Wolf Out, as
Franciska, a wife and potential spy.
Andrew Leung
Andrew Leung was nominated for a BBC Radio Drama Award
(which he didn’t win). I think he should
have, as he was excellent in Crime Down
Under: Prime Cut, the Australian crime thriller adapted by Adrian Bean. Leung played DSC Philip “Cato” Kwong, exiled
from the detective fast track—he had been on all the recruitment posters as the
golden boy for multiracial Australian policing—to the Stock Squad. Cato was charming but his own worst enemy,
and the type of sleuth I would like to follow in further adventures.
Gillian Kearney
I had to highlight Gillian Kearney’s performances in two
dramas I heard this year. The Second Son by Peter Whalley was an
interesting and unnerving play in which an estranged son’s identity is
stolen. Kearney played the son’s fiancée
who is instrumental (for good or bad) in setting events in motion. She was utterly believable as the journalist
who isn’t above using subterfuge. More
impressive still was her performance in Nightmare
by Dave Simpson from 2004. This was an excellent and thrilling
psychological drama with excellent performances throughout. Kearney played Jilly, a nurse who is
tormented by recurring nightmares of being stalked by a masked murderer. Jilly can barely keep hold of her insanity
when her nightmares become reality, and yet no one believes that she is being
stalked. She was also great in Don
Webb’s Boots on the Ground (see
below).
Outstanding Directors
As I said last year, for me personally, directors/producers
have a difficult time standing out.
Basically, if they’ve done their job well, you shouldn’t really notice
their presence at all (that’s my opinion, anyway). Nevertheless, there are some directors whose
batting averages are just so superb, they deserve a shout-out.
Sally Avens
Sally Avens is an experienced director, with many credits to
her name. As just a sample, there were
many dramas I heard in 2017 directed by her which are worthy of a mention. These include A Call from the Dead from 1997, an outrageous, surreal, and very suspenseful
drama by Carey Harrison. In it, a
psychologist gets a call in the middle of the night from his former patient,
who had always been troubled by fears of being confined, of premature
burial. This patient claims he has been
accidentally buried alive and that he is calling from inside his coffin. Some
very good performances and an audacious piece of radio. A
Soldier’s Debt from 1999 is an early-ish Nick Warburton play, and I must
say to me it didn’t at all resemble his normal fare. With some notable performances from Amanda
Root and Burt Caesar, it was memorable and interesting, set at an African
British Council where four people’s fates converge on a record of a performance
of Macbeth. Dessert
Island Discs from 1998 was an interesting idea in which guests on Desert Island Discs who upset then-host
Sue Lawley were exiled to the island, their mounting lies attacking them until
they ‘fessed up. More current dramas
include the 2017 adaptation of The
Mysteries of Udolpho by Hattie Naylor, much-abbreviated. The veils and
waxworks were all sublimated in this version; the threat of physical (and
particularly, sexual) violence was instead made very real. Avens also directed the accompanying
adaptation of Northanger Abbey, also
adapted by Naylor, which I enjoyed very much.
Bruce Young
I’ve been listening to Bruce Young-directed plays since I
came to the UK, including oodles of dramas I’ve really enjoyed: HMS
Surprise and Desolation Island (superb
adaptations of superb Patrick O’Brian novels) and Olalla (a fascinating Gothic tale from R.L. Stevenson) to name a
few. In 2017 he really demonstrated his
versatility as a director with two quite different productions. After
Independence by May Sumbwanyambe was co-directed by George Terby. It was the adaptation of a challenging stage
play, and probably Peter Guinness’ best performance that I’ve heard to date. White Zimbabweans, Guy (Guinness), Kathleen
(Sandra Duncan), and Chibo (Beatrice Robinny) are being given a deal by the new
government in the 1990s to sell their farm.
Guy makes courageous arguments against Mr Charles (Stefan Adekwila), the
government man who has come to take the land from him, despite suffering from
cancer. I found The Tragic History of My Nose by Alistair Jessiman less satisfying, yet still
thought-provoking. Nikolai Gogol (Robert
Jack) is dead—and he’s not quite sure how he got there. He recalls the events that led to his death
by starvation. On a religious crusade to
glorify God through his writing, and yet loathe to abandon his literary
predecessors Pushkin and Homer, Gogol tries to emulate the severe Father
Matthew (Crawford Logan). At the same
time, he is fixated on Joseph (Daniel Boyd), a young actor whose attentions may
be false or may be true—it’s hard to tell for sure. A humorous, slow simmer of a drama, with some
good voices.
Gary Brown
Salford-based Gary Brown packed a wollop in 2017 with
multiple and diverse dramas. Inventing Scotland by Mike Harris took
a little while to get into, but it was an entertaining comedy about how Sir
Walter Scott and his son-in-law conspired to give a false but patriotic blanc-mange of Scottish history and
culture to visiting future George IV.
Everyone was kitted out in fake tartan while the Prince was only
interested in fleshy women and drinking (though he and Sir Walter Scott did
have a bawling session regarding their fraught relationships with their
fathers, respectively). The son-in-law
was quite a character, hanging on to the whole thing in order to get his own
novel published (and promptly forgotten by the world at large) and betraying an
old nationalist friend unto his death in order to do this. The off-the-wall tone took a little getting
used to, but I thought it was well-written and acted in a great spirit of fun. China
Girl by Tom Fry, originally from 2012, was deceptively moving for me. In it, a slightly older couple (Sophie
Thompson and Richard Lumsten) have been let down by IVF treatment (a common
thread on Radio 4!) and decide to adopt from China. More than Hattie Naylor’s Little Cinderellas from 2003, this play
exposes the seedy underbelly of the whole adoption process: the couple have to make a “donation” in order
to get their baby and they find that her mental and physical health may be much
less salubrious than they were led to believe when they fail to bond with the
baby. They also obsess too much over her
cultural heritage, but by the dawn of the year 2000, everything seems to be
working out okay. I found MetaphorMoses by Gary Ogin to be quite
funny! The story was about Matthew
(Ashley Margolis), a closet Jew who is marrying non-Jewish Ellie (Verity Henry). When he purposely eats some pork, he gets
indigestion, and then gets taken over by the personality of his ancestor
Moishe, a very angry Jew who accidentally ate pork while in exile in Siberia. It takes the help of the rabbi (David
Fleeshman) and a neurotic shrink (Lloyd Peters) to help the family figure this
out, however. Most effective for me,
however, was Boots on the Ground by
Don Webb from 2013, starring the criminally underrated Lee Ingleby. This was an excellent play that kept me
guessing, with a truly ambiguous central character. I’m struggling to summarize the story. A military side project testing facility is
eager to finish its latest sets of tests with good data so that the main
scientists can go off to plummy jobs in California, based on the strength of
their research. Their put-upon research
assistant, single mother Joni (Gillian Kearney), feels underrated. Marks (Ingleby), a very good soldier, comes
in as part of the tests—but with an ulterior agenda. He is searching for his vanished friend—or is
he? Well-made and very intelligent
drama.
Andrew Dubber & Belinda Todd
I thought Claybourne,
the Kiwi epic from 1998, deserved another round of applause for its sheer scale
and ambition. The short format was
perfect for an infinite number of cliffhangers, which they exploited
brilliantly, and for building character. Claybourne
was broadcast on NewsTalkZB in 15-minute chunks, and it was a
hard-to-categorize blend of soap opera, sci fi mystery, fantasy, and New
Zealand travelogue. All the characters
surprised and delighted, from the jazz-listening, latte-drinking mysterious
computer engineer Clive; to Janine, ultimately ill-fated thief,
not-very-professional nurse, and flirt.
I loved learning about Maori customs against the backdrop of the absurd,
exploitative corporate retreat/theme park Maori World. It was very well-produced, with a rich sound
world filled with keynote sounds which could establish in a flash whether you
were in a police station in Cowacowa or being given cement body casts in the
foundations of Maori World (I kid you not!).
I absolutely did not want the story to end.
David Blount
Speaking of The
Mysteries of Udolpho as I was earlier, a previous version (I’m not sure
from what year) was directed by David Blount, a much fuller, elaborated version
dramatized by Catherine Czerkawska. It,
too, was quite good. However, I single
out David Blount for a 1997 dramatization of the novel Rogue Herries by Hugh Walpole, a dramatization I thought was
absolutely magical. Set in the 18th
century, the Quixotic quest of the main character is mirrored in the personal
life of its author, the closeted Walpole, and with that in mind, it’s a very
moving story. Francis Herries (Gavin
Muir) takes his wife Margaret and their children to his remote homeland in
savage Cumbria. Mostly it’s a novel
about people’s characters, their perversity and their capacity for change. And indeed, on that front it is quite
remarkable. Francis changes from a
proud, emotionally stunted husband who emotionally mistreats his wife to a man
who understands the true meaning of love after years pining after the much
younger, emotionally damaged Mirabell Starr.
Overall, a cracking success.
Outstanding Writers
I found this a hard category to write about. I tried to pick writers who wrote something
new (to me, at any rate) that really packed a punch. This often ended up being writers of serials
or series, but not always.
Roger Danes
Roger Danes is adaptor par
excellence. He has adapted all three
of the BBC Radio adaptations of the Patrick O’Brian novels, Master and Commander, HMS Surprise, and
Desolation Island, the latter of
which (from 2013) is, I think, the best of all.
As I said in previous reviews, I thought Stephen as played by Nigel
Anthony (with a strong Irish accent, in Master
and Commander, which was directed by Adrian Bean) AND by Richard Dillane
both had their virtues. Nevertheless, if
forced to choose, I think I would choose Dillane. I’d forgotten how arch Stephen is in this
book, which Dillane carried off well, and the pathos was very, very muted. The pacing was excellent, and I was surprised
at how well the action sequences worked.
Very impressed. And naturally,
David Robb is the perfect Jack Aubrey. I
admired Danes’ skill in bringing in all the exposition of Stephen’s spying
without overloading the narrative. They
even found time for Stephen and Jack to play some Mozart on Christmas Day. In 2017, I also heard Danes’ series The Lady Detectives, from 2005, which I
thought was excellent overall. Among
these adaptations were The Golden
Slipper by Anna Green, in which Violet Strange was a New York-based
detective, a society girl who very quietly did other work on the side. The structure of the piece was unusual and
not chronological, which lent it great weight and emotion when all was finally
revealed. Very inspiring and quite
touching. The American accents were okay too!
I also quite liked The Redhill
Sisterhood by Catherine Pirkins. Loveday
Brookes was the sleuth in this one, an experienced and unflappable detective,
valued by policemen and laymen alike.
Young, attractive, and with a mind like a steel trap, she managed to
entrap her opponent, who had disguised himself as an admiring fan and
journalist, using invisible ink and telegrams, among other “modern”
inventions. She managed to clear a group
of nuns from false accusation and help round up a gang of house burglars. I was very impressed with her and with the
series in general. The Lady Detectives was directed by Patrick Rayner.
Don Webb
Don Webb wrote the fantastic Boots on the Ground, mentioned above, as well as the slightly
against-type Witch Water Green from
the 1984 Spine Chillers series. A woman (Pam Ferris) with a young baby and a
constantly traveling husband moves out to a rural area where her house is
called Witch Water Green. She is almost
saved by a neighbor but by the end falls neatly into the clutches of a
clergyman (the ever-sinister Nigel Anthony) and his co-conspirator, the local
(female) doctor. Creepy stuff and
well-written.
Carolyn Bonnyman
Carolyn Bonnyman wrote Talking
Latin in 2004, and the drama made such a big impression on me I thought it
would be remiss not to include her in this section of the awards. Ably directed by David Jackson Young, this
was a very slow burn. Karen (Julie
Dunkeyson) and her husband Steve have a very dysfunctional relationship. He is glued to his chair in the lounge
watching TV all day long. One day, Karen
decides just to leave. She takes the car
and the clothes on her back. Seven years
later, she’s still working for Sal Minelli (yes, it’s a joke they exploit) who
runs a fast food fry up shop in Glasgow.
Karen refuses to open up to anyone about her past, but she’s become part
of the fry up family and visits Sal in hospital. Sal and his wife Francesca (Scots-Italian)
are having a ruby wedding anniversary, to which Karen and copper Davie go (in
fancy dress as it’s Halloween). Davie has
been trying for a long time to get together with the cagey Karen. Just when it looks like they’re going to,
Steve shows up. He has gone through a
total reversal in his life, now a mature student at university in history and
classical languages (hence the title), with a girlfriend and a child on the
way. I think why I initially had
problems with the play was the extremely Naturalistic dialogue which didn’t
seem to say anything, so I kept drifting from it as you would listening to DJ
chat show. Yet I thought the writing was
very convincing.
Rosemary Timperley
Rosemary Timperley’s writing had a huge impact on me this
year, though she’s been dead for 30 years.
A prolific writer of novels (60) and short stories (hundreds), some of
the following dramas were written by her, though most were adapted from her
existing print works. As a writer of
ghost stories, she must rank up there with Robert Westall, though, like him,
she certainly had her motifs, and they often hinged on uncanny experiences
rather than purely frightening ones. One
of the oldest British radio dramas I’ve heard, Christmas Meeting from 1963, was a beautiful and delightful short
drama about a middle-aged single woman (Flora Robson) distraught at spending
Christmas alone in a bedsit. She isn’t
quite alone, however, when she meets a young student (Barry Justice) who is
also lodging there. After a time, she
realizes he isn’t from her century; in fact, he’s an early 19th century poet,
and a ghost. Instead of being
frightened, they share a connection, and the young poet/ghost is attracted to
the older woman. In 1979, she inaugurated
the BBC World Service series Haunted with
Little Girl Lost, one of Timperley’s
more genuinely sinister turns. The
series was directed by Derek Hoddinott. Little Girl Lost was unnerving, with
Sally (Jenny Linden) calling in a doctor as her mother-in-law, Mrs Grove (Ruth
Dunning), claims to be talking to her late husband. Mrs Grove claims not to be mad but that she can hear her dead husband, who is
rude. Mrs Grove doesn’t seem a very nice
person, which is not the kind of ghost you want haunting you. Her son, Herbert (John Carson), discovers her
dead and confronts his daughter, Janet (Bernadette Windsor), who helped her
grandmother commit suicide and then was supposed to follow her, but didn’t
quite make it. Walk on the Water was the prototypical Timperley story—Rachel (Anna
Cooper) was a child when she went to the seaside with her parents. She was making sand castles when a strange
man (Brian Hewlett) came up to her. All
they said to each other was “hello.” The
man was then said to have committed suicide by walking into the sea. Years later, Rachel married Peter (David
Ashford) and went on honeymoon in Venice.
Throughout the rest of her life, she kept seeing the man. All he would ever say was “hello.” An ethereal and weird, though not exactly
frightening, story. Listen to the Silence included aspects of both Little Girl Lost and Walk on
the Water; Mary Smith (Gwen Watford) was adopted, she has no family that
she knows of and lodges in a house on her own.
She has a job at a bank but no friends.
She has been terrified of silence all her life and puts on the radio
constantly to avoid it. One day she
turns off the radio and hears a voice speaking to her: it’s her grandfather (George Pravda), a
Polish sea captain from the late 19th century, who starts telling
her all his adventures. There was a
second series of Haunted in 1982,
far less imaginative and relying on the writers John Keir Cross, Wilkie
Collins, and HG Wells (though the Bram Stoker entry and the Ray Bradbury
entries are quite good). A third series
followed in 1984, more varied in range and fittingly completed by a Rosemary
Timperley tale, the bizarre and humorous Channel
Crossing. Jack (Nicholas Lyndhurst)
gets really annoyed by his dad, the straitlaced, conventional Edward (Peter
Sallis). Frances (Patsy Rowlandson),
Jack’s mother, also gets annoyed with her husband. Edward gets annoyed with Frances. They are all going on holiday together to
France. Before they go, Jack accuses the
neighbor of killing his wife during one of their loud brawls. On the crossing to France, Jack is thinking
how easy it would be to push his dad, and even his mom, off the boat. Shortly after this, he meets Gregory and
Annabelle. Gregory has just pushed the
obese Annabelle off the boat, and unbeknownst to him, Annabelle has poisoned
his coffee. So they are both now ghosts
(!!) floating along the boat. Jack is
thus less inclined to kill his parents.
I think (?) it was supposed to be a darkly comic look at families’
natural desires to get so angry they want to do away with each other.
Peter Wolf
Peter Wolf wrote the aforementioned Ghost on the Moor and also Black
Queen to King’s Castle from 2002. This
was a delicious story of Anne Boleyn’s ghost returning unknowingly to her
childhood home of Blickling Hall when she thinks she has woken up the night of
her execution in the Tower. She recalls
her life, her return from court in France where she is immediately sent to
Henry Tudor’s court to fill in where her sister Mary has failed, after having
already slept around at the French court (due mainly to her extremely ambitious
father, determined to sacrifice his children on ambition’s altar). Henry does eventually take notice of Anne, as
she has been placed as Catherine of Aragon’s lady-in-waiting, but Anne is
insistent that she will not yield her favors until Henry divorces. Naturally, Anne’s triumph is short-lived
after the birth of Elizabeth and a miscarried baby. Her former allies, such as Thomas Cromwell,
desert her. She is heartened, however,
upon returning to the 20th century as a ghost, that her daughter
Elizabeth was queen. Well-written, this
hinged on the tremendous performance by Katherine Pogson as Anne. David Troughton was also quite convincing as
the self-important Henry. It was also
rather spooky!
