My
goodness, entering Quarter 4 already? It
feels like 2016 just began a few months ago.
Oh well. So the end of Quarter 3
represents one year since I’ve had the iPlayer Radio app and have been
listening to shed-loads more drama than I used to. So . . . hooray?
001 Historical Drama – New
Radio 4 gave us a Daniel Defoe season, presumably in
commemoration of the anniversary of the Great Fire of London (since we were all
Pepys-ed out from the many seasons of The
Diary of Samuel Pepys). While I
enjoyed the dramatization of Moll
Flanders starring Jessica Hynes, and the biopic about Defoe himself (played
across the dramas by Ben Miles), I was most impressed by the dramatization of
his Journal of the Plague Year by
Michael Butt. It was nicely radiogenic,
with voices interwoven with tolling bells as shortcuts for various parishes as
people started dying. Appropriately—and
as with all the Defoe pieces—this was nicely meta, as Defoe was writing it in
his 60s and slowly losing his mind with paranoia, while looking backwards to
the 1660s when he was a child. Although the
narrator of Journal of the Plague Year,
HR, is based on his uncle, there is a very clear sense that Defoe felt
mistreated by his uncle. Defoe debates
back and forth with himself about whether he overeggs the pudding, and many of
the oft-repeated things we seem to know about the Plague years (the “bring out
your dead” for one thing) are questioned by Defoe himself as invention or
truth. It was directed by Emma Harding
and co-starred Adrian Scarborough, Sean Baker, James Lailey, Elizabeth Bennett,
Claire Perkins, Kirstie Osborne, Brian Protheroe, Nick Underwood, Tom
Forrester, Adie Allan, Edward Prout, and David Counsellor played a variety of
characters.
Early in the quarter, I was still finishing up the
commemorative (and meticulously-researched, as they never tire of saying) drama
about the First World War, Tommies (the
1916 season), and boy, was I in for a whopper.
9 June 1916 by Michael
Chaplin made me die a little inside. To
remind you, the story is taking place shortly before the Battle of the
Somme. Mickey Bliss gets the idea to
test Capitaine Vassereau’s “Parleur” signalling equipment in No Man’s Land with
the help of a 6 foot keen young Indian recruit. I don’t want to spoil this
episode for you, as it was amazing, but I will say I was actually grimacing on
the Tube while I was listening to certain sections, and people were looking at
me funny. It was definitely a high point
of the quarter. It was directed by David
Hunter and starred Lee Ross as Mickey Bliss and Colin Holt as Sgt Pinto, with Sagar
Radia, Ewan Bailey, Sam Alexander, Nick Underwood, Sargan Yelda and Indira
Varma as the commentator.
Another really outstanding episode of Tommies was 16 June 1916 by
Jonathan Ruffell. This was spectacular,
and an example of the cumulative effect (even though I’ve only been listening
for the past two series) really giving you startling drama. Mickey Bliss is in Paris to help with the
signalling branch there, where he meets Miss Softley who, with the widowed Mrs
Flinders, is trying to pinpoint where the Germans are and will be moving their
artillery based on their wireless signals.
Mickey helps them, though as the commentator tells us, their error will
actually kill a lot of people, with long-lasting effects. In Paris is Robert DeTullio, who Mickey
encounters in a charged moment, as Mickey knows DeTullio is a German spy and
DeTullio has intercepted a letter addressed to Mickey from DeTullio’s wife Céléstine,
Mickey’s long-lost love. Miss Softley
surprises Mickey by telling him they know DeTullio is a spy and in fact, he’s a
double agent. Mickey also knows that
Miss Softley and Mrs Flinders are lesbian lovers; his lack of disgust or
surprise makes Mickey almost too modern, too good to be true. Nevertheless, Miss Softley gives him the code
to the safe where DeTullio is keeping Céléstine’s letter. I won’t spoil this one any more, but I will
say it’s full of even more surprises. I
was hoping to get some closure with the last few episodes of Tommies in this season, but I’ll have
to wait til next year to find out what happens at the Battle of the Somme for
our characters. The episode was directed
by David Hunter and starred Lee Ross, Faye Castelow, Justin Salinger, Adie
Allen, Pippa Nixon, James Lailey, Ewan Bailey, Nick Underwood, Maksim Mijovic,
and Indira Varma.
Finally, Philip Palmer contributed two dynamite plays about
Hungry in 1963 under the title Keeping
the Wolf Out. The main character was
a not-very-likable detective who tries to work around the Communist system,
tripped up at every turn by his boss—what a voice on the actor playing that
part!—and his colleagues as well as his wife and mistress. The actors’ voices were distinctive as was
the writer’s voice; this was unlike anything I’d heard before. The cases themselves were grisly but
secondary to the detective character and his struggles. I hope they will make more of these. They were directed by Toby Swift and starred Leo
Bill, Claire Corbett, Andy Linden, Nicolas Ferguson, Susan Jameson, Sargen
Jelda, Nick Underwood, Richard Pepple, and Sam Riggs.
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