Monday, August 5, 2019

Quarter 1 Reviews- 018 Mystery- Old


018 Mystery – Old

At times, I did despair of Hanging Judge from 1953; at an hour and a half, it was WAY, WAY too long (a consequence of its era, no doubt, but also probably due to writer Raymond Massey’s self-indulgence and a desire to give star Boris Karloff a really good part).  I reckon you could have done it in half an hour, 45 minutes tops, these days, and made a really tight thriller.  Nevertheless, Karloff does get a chance to really test those acting chops, playing a cavern-voiced, sinister, yet highly urbane and eloquent High Court judge who is known for convicting innocent men and sending them to the gallows.  This earns him enemies.  A supremely slimy individual, Sir Francis Brittain leads a double life in the remote countryside as Frederick Bainbridge, where he has illicit relations (how taboo for radio in 1953!) with a guileless West Country servant called Mary Reddish (Gabrielle Blunt).  One day, he gets accosted at his club by John Teal (John T. St Barry), who arranges to meet him in Norfolk.  There, Teal reveals he is Brittain’s illegitimate son and has brought letters Brittain wrote to his mother, first of all urging an abortion, then washing his hands of the whole affair.  However, Teal is at least as horrid as his father, as he engineers his own death by Brittain’s hands, making it look like a premeditated murder.  Immunity can protect Brittain only for so long, and eventually he is put on trial, his enemies baying for his blood.  As a vehicle for Karloff, it’s great stuff; as a narrative, it’s pretty tortured yet effective.  Nevertheless, it’s populated by boring stuffed shirts, lawyers and policemen the lot of them, despite the best efforts of the actors.  What a stifling place Britain must have been in 1953.  No wonder the Goons were trying to drive themselves sane.  It was produced by Cleland Finn and also starred Hugh Manning, Duncan McIntyre, Howieson Culff, Robert Webber, Richard Williams, Norman Claridge, and Richard Hutton.

Quarter 1 Reviews- 016 Speculative Fiction- New


016 Speculative Fiction – New 

I had difficulty processing The Receiver of Wreck by Ben Cottam.  He is evidently talented, loving to moonlight in his own dramas and seems firmly situated in the north of England.  Jen, the titular Receiver of Wreck as played by Alice Lowe, was real enough, isolated in her job, which forced her to be continually on the road.  When arriving in a ghost of a coastal Lancashire town, her grip on reality begins to unpeel (though it’s unclear, in a very sort of magical realist way, whether her experiences are shared by others; some of them seem to be).  So it’s an odd and challenging mix between very down-to-earth characters, such as librarian/trainspotter/general geek Malcolm (Pearce Quigley doing his best James Fleet) and policewoman Kelly (Lucy Gaskell), and mystical, mysterious characters such as the Mayor, the sinister and oh-so-(northern)-posh Prudence Peacock and the Polish immigrant who, like Jen, can never go home.  What was the wreck of the ship that might spell salvation for a northern town with no industry and no future?  What was the ghost of the railway station doing at night keeping a hyper-active Jen awake?  What was the significance of Kelly being unable to scream?  What were we to make of Coast Guard Adam buying flowers for Jen?  Did Jen ever get out of the town or she is stuck there, like the Prisoner in Portmeirion?  I don’t know, but it was an interesting drama nonetheless.  It was directed by Alison Crawford.

Hello Caller by Jonathan Holloway was an interesting idea for a drama.  The idea is that most of the telephone boxes across the UK are being dismantled.  So where are all those calls—stored in the ether, or like the magical post-horn or Rabelais’ sound plums—going?  Well, into our ears, apparently, as we hear a kaleidoscope (kaleidophone?) of conversations.  Some of the more interesting ones go on for a long time; sometimes we can hear both speakers, sometimes only one.  For example, a middle-aged woman has just found out she has months to live, so she’s told her husband, but doesn’t want to tell the children.  She has to make plans for the maintenance of one of her developmentally disabled children, in case her husband then dies, too.  It was quite moving.  While we had a time travel drama—in which a woman calling from the 1950s reaches a man in the 1990s—their connection is brief.  Later, we even have telecommunications with a ghost—in the 1970s, a boy and a girl connect over the line, only for him to subsequently realize she has died a few months previously, and now her sole existence is within the telephone wires.  Literally haunting.  Quite an unusual format for an Afternoon Drama; it’s the kind of thing I would have expected to hear as a podcast.  It, too, was directed by Alison Crawford and starred the excellent Annette Badland, Luke MacGregor, Sean Murray, David Reakes, and Alex Tregear. 

Stopping to think about the story in Martians made me really sad.  It’s one thing to move to another country.  It’s another thing to sign up for a mission to Mars knowing you will never be able to return to Earth, let alone see your family again.  That’s what Laura (Tia Bannon) has done in this story, set in the near future, in which she has joined a group of young astronauts who are going to start a colony on Mars.  Laura is a midwife, enriched by the strains of her St Lucian grandmother (who is introduced to us via camcorder recordings from the early Noughties) and her Irish father.  This drama stitches together her last moments with her family, as she packs her 100g of personal items, helped by her brother Michael; final conversations between her mother and father; and Laura interviewed with her fellow Martians on a radio chat show.  Laura’s older sister Margot is the only one who questions Laura’s choice, but does so only in interior monologue; I wish she had voiced her concerns out loud, to bring that part of the drama some actual closure.  Did Laura ever make it to Mars?  I guess that’s the subject for another drama.  Martians was written by Lucy Caldwell and starred Toheeb Jimoh, Angel Coulby, Michelle Greenridge, Lloyd Hutchinson, Joy Richardson, Tallulah Bond, Ronny Jhuti, and Beth Goddard.  It was directed by Celia De Wolff. 

Quarter 1 Reviews- 015 Speculative Fiction- Old


015 Speculative Fiction – Old 

I felt that the 2018-19 crop of holiday offerings had been voluminous, but very few of them really stood for the Christmas spirit as well as being entertaining and original.  I almost didn’t listen to Grace and the Angel, but I’m glad I did.  It’s the story of an Angel (Rudolph Walker) who is normally a “glad tidings” Christmas angel who is brought in at the last moment by the Heavenly Clerk (Jonathan Forbes) to be an Angel of Death to an old lady, Grace (Marlene Sidaway).  Although you can’t see Angel, you can imagine his flamboyant and ostentatious appearance and personality, which is heavily Afro-Caribbean in flavor (which is partially the point—see below).  You’re introduced to Grace, meanwhile, by her writing a letter to the editor on Christmas Eve about vanishing British values. Also nearby are St Nick (John Hartley) and Prancer (Peter Darney), who must be unique among the canon of audio drama characters, being sentient light displays on a roof.  They sound like East End geezers.  My imagination was flailing around, trying to reconcile this (in a good way).  When inexperienced Angel arrives, he accidentally gets tangled in the wires and has to be helped by Grace.  Her childless neighbors, Rosie (Carolyn Jones) and Vernon (Jonathan Kydd) and Liz (Carolyn Pickles) and Derek (Sean Baker) are thrown together when Angel has caused the electricity all around the block to go out.  Grace is very resistant, firstly, to the idea of dying—why didn’t her late husband come to take her away?—but unmistakably, she asks, “Why did they send you?”  This refers, of course, to Grace’s perception that God and God’s angels must be white.  The drama ends on a hopeful note.  It could have easily turned saccharine, but I thought it was extremely well-written, with strong performances (and Angel’s wings were described as being scented in a highly sensual way you don’t get with many radio dramas).  Originally from 2001, it was written by Sheila Goff and directed by David Hunter.

Haunting Women was an interesting series from Dermot Bolger retelling legends about Irish female ghosts.  I liked them all, but I guess the one that I found most memorable was “The Riding Crop.”  Beatrice (Jodi O’Neill), a landed lady in the “big house,” threatens to disinherit her younger sister Lucinda (Alison McKenna) if she marries Anthony (Luke Griffin), Beatrice’s childhood sweetheart.  The couple risk her wrath and live in poverty for ten years.  Beatrice meets a Russian prince abroad, falls in love with him and marries him, but he dies.  She brings his jewelled riding crop back to her house.  After ten years, Lucinda has had enough and forces Beatrice’s butler, Creed (John Hewitt), to stop in his daily rounds in which he takes Beatrice by carriage across her lands, regular as clockwork.  What greets Lucinda and Anthony is a terrible tale; Beatrice died quite a long time before, but specified in her will that Creed would drive around her embalmed corpse just as if she was still living.  Creed was more afraid of her dead than alive and so felt compelled to obey!  As with all the Haunting Women stories, it had a frame story, in this case, Sharon, a cataloguer, trying to find out from the Priest why the riding crop is still in the library of the seminary, as they go through their valuation of the property before selling it.  Produced by Gemma Bolger, this drama was originally from 2005.