Quarter 3 Reviews- 015 Speculative Fiction-Old

015 Speculative Fiction – Old

As you probably know, I think very highly of almost every radio drama I’ve ever heard by Nick Warburton (indeed, his batting average is as high as any other radio drama writer other than, perhaps, Hattie Naylor or Don Webb). I wasn’t sure when I started listening to Irongate, from 2013, whether it was going to rise to the top or settle somewhere in the middle of his oeuvre, but in the end, I think it did the former. As suggested below, it’s a deceptively simple two-hander.  Laura (Emma Fielding) is walking from Kew Bridge to Tower Bridge; she’s on a mission as she’s doing it for her dead husband on his birthday.  She is annoyed to be accosted by a man, James Fleet playing his typical bumbling, inoffensive character, who insists on dogging her step. He keeps telling her he understands how she feels. I love when Warburton does ghost stories.  Well-done. Irongate was directed by Peter Kavanagh.

There are a number of actors who think they can also write good radio drama, but I think Lenny Henry is the only one who has consistently proven himself.  That said, Miss You Still wasn’t at all what I was expecting.  It had a strong and unapologetic vein of the supernatural running through it.  Henry plays Charlie, a bus driver who is slowly going to pieces.  His wife and daughter are dead, and he has stopped going to work.  Joyce (Clare Perkins), an administrator at the bus station, decides to try to cheer Charlie up by bringing him soup.  Reluctantly accompanying her is her teenage daughter Roxanne (Bunmi Mojekwu).  Both are recent transplants to the Midlands (Henry has a soft spot for the Midlands) from London (although Joyce is originally from the Caribbean).  In helping Charlie clean his house (again, reluctantly), Roxanne realizes that his house is haunted, by the spirits of his daughter and wife, although there is definitely a hint of demonology as well. Although the drama was surprisingly dark, I admire the way Henry understands and can write young people well.  Also, Joyce (much like Stephen K Amos’ Nigerian mother in What Does the K Stand For?), as a strong, redoubtable black woman, is such a contrast with the flurry of satirized white, middle class Englishwomen on Radio 4 in the second half of 2018.  Originally from 2013, Miss You Still was directed by Claire Grove and also starred Amit Shah and Tranae Sinclair.