Quarter 2 Reviews- Speculative Fiction- Old

015 Speculative Fiction – Old 

May Child was an emotionally wrenching story that carved out a place of its own as it delved deeply into a childhood tragedy that emotionally crippled a woman for most of her life.  Margaret (Patricia Routledge) gets a phone message from Ron (Roy Hudd), who is back in England after having spent some time living in the Costa del Sol.  He wants to reconnect with her.  Margaret, who is in the habit of talking to herself, dismisses his message.  She likes living alone and doesn’t want to interact with anyone, including the rather pathetic May (Emily Fleeshman), a schoolgirl who shows up during a thunderstorm (in fact, she has to climb through a window because Margaret has put so many locks on the door she can’t be bothered to open it).  Margaret tries her damnedest to send May away, preserving every last defense as May gets her to admit that she was once engaged to Roy but chickened out of marrying him.  She spent all her working life in a butcher’s shop at the till and hated it.  Indeed, as May forces Margaret to admit, she has not had real happiness in life since childhood—and has indeed not felt she deserved happiness.  I can’t give away the twist here, but it leads to an ending that was certainly deserved.  May Child was written by Elizabeth Kuti and directed by Tanya Nash in 2004.  

The vast majority of Time Hops was wonderful fun (I was disappointed by the ending).  Time Hops is the unlikely story of EK6 (Sara Crowe), a mouse-scientist from the future, and her pursuer, RV101, a rabbit-warrior, also from the future.  David Harewood was absolutely wonderful as the murderous, rather Judge Dredd-like RV101.  Eek (as the mouse called herself) decided to steal a Time Bike and go to the past to try to stop the cataclysmic event that caused the Earth to be polluted, and all life on it to be reduced to mutated mice, rats, and rabbits living in underground warrens.  In stealing a Time Bike, she made the mistake of choosing Norton (Ian Masters), not Harley (Bradley Lavelle), so that when she ordered Harley to self-destruct, he put it off until RV101 stole him and pursued Eek.  Eek went back to 1994 where she met surly (and rather badly dated!) teenager Steph (Nicola Stapleton), her younger brother Max (Dax O’Callaghan), and local rabble-rouser Baz (Paul Reynolds).  The majority of the next four episodes sees RV101 and Baz in pursuit of Steph, Max, and Eek as they hop through time.  This, rather amazingly, also gives Steph, Max, and Eek a sidekick in the shape of young Horatio Nelson (Joshua Towb)!!  It’s wonderfully mental fun, with clear homages to Doctor Who, and the timey-wimeyness (at least before the cop-out ending) is pretty good.  Worth noting, too, is the theme music, which seems to me the style that the Doctor Who theme would have been like if the show was still running in 1994.  Time Hops was written by Alan Gilbey and David Richard-Fox and produced by Nandita Ghose.

012 Contemporary Comedy- Old

012 Contemporary Comedy – Old 

I adored Crazy Big Fish by Gill Adams. Granted, it was made almost 20 years ago, and hopefully things have gotten a little better for working class women in the North since then.  Be that as it may, it was still refreshing to hear working class northern accents on Radio 4 (as it would have been on original broadcast), and still more refreshing for them all to be women (with a marked emphasis on middle aged to older women).  Gill Adams clearly thought so, which is why her comedy-drama was made, to blow some fresh air into the normal schedule of contemporary British radio drama. It’s the story of five women who meet in order to audition for a part in contemporary, northern vernacular earthy stage drama Fish and Leather, written by Gill Adams.  Indeed, the unifying and expositional device that opens each episode is Gill’s answerphone message, after which the various women leave messages of various coherence throughout the serial. Rita (Deborah McAndrew) is a middle aged (and we are led to believe, dumpy and rather unattractive) housewife.  She’s never learned to read properly, and has spent the last twenty years raising children with her highly traditional husband, Billy (Terence Mann), who is now mostly out of work.  She has little money, few friends, and a fairly circumscribed existence, living with her mother, Gladys, who is fond of drinking (snowballs), betting, staying in bed, and antagonizing Billy—but Gladys, it turns out, is the only person who believes in Rita—more than Rita herself does.  Indeed, Rita would never have had the courage to audition for Fish and Leather had her mother not forced her to do so.  At the audition, Rita meets Pauline, and it’s hate at first sight.  The only creature in whom Pauline has any interest at the start of the drama is her dog, Diana, whom she babies and spoils.  To the rest of the world, she’s a right madam.  Like Rita, she is middle aged and not particularly attractive and is very loud-mouthed and sharp.  Eventually, when they are cast as Fish and Leather, Rita and Pauline come to appreciate each other.  Sandy is living with her bourgeois, upwardly mobile mother, with whom she really cannot get along, after having left her job as a dancer on a cruise ship.  She is too good for her town and can’t wait to get out.  Sandy becomes the costume designer and makeup artist for the production.  Part of what softens Pauline is Babs, a young woman who has spent most of her adult life taking care of her cantankerous, emotionally abusive, alcoholic father.  Babs has serious self-esteem issues, but the rest of the Fish and Leather group help her to become a more confident person.  Indeed, Rita and Babs have both been oppressed by the patriarchal structure (still, in 2000, clearly a force to be reckoned with in the traditional, conservative households of the northern working class); Sandy is struggling against the strictures of bourgeois society, and Pauline needs help relating to other people.  All of the women are very engaging, and it makes for a hilarious comedy and a moving story, in which you hope against all odds they succeed.  Adams is clearly writing from life, and the actors are all splendid and utterly believable.  Directed by Polly Thomas, Crazy Big Fish also starred Ruth Holden, Rachel Davies, Katy Cavanagh, and Sally Walsh. 

Quarter 2 Reviews- 010 Police Procedural- New

010 Police Procedural – New 

I was extremely impressed by Mark Lawson’s adaptation of Polish detective story bestseller Rage, very topical and with wonderfully idiosyncratic characters.  While the drama revolves around the traditionally high incidences of domestic violence in Poland, it is still told from the point of view of a male detective, the self-absorbed, sarcastic, insightful womanizer Teodor Szacki (Bryan Dick)—hence its thought-provoking, ambiguous message. Teo has moved from posting to posting, restless and seemingly unhappy about the state of justice in Poland.  While in Warsaw, his boss was “Russian feminazi” Olga Kuzniecow (Alexandra Mathie).  She is his boss once again in Olmsted.  Teo’s live-in girlfriend, the much younger Klara (Rachel Austin), followed him from Warsaw and is furious when he breaks up with her, seemingly so his teenage daughter, Hela (Caitlin Ward), can move in with him temporarily while her mother is pursuing scholarly study in the US.  Despite Teo’s general likeability, the way he misunderstands women and his failure as a parent make him deeply flawed.  Case in point, he fails to take the domestic abuse report of Maria K (Claire Benedict) seriously, an error that comes back to haunt him.  Along with all these great characters, the gruesomeness of the crime is horrifying and intriguing.  A body is found in an underground bunker and immediately dismissed as a German.  However, not only is the skeleton remarkably complete, the way the flesh has been stripped from the bones is suspect.  Eventually, Teo’s pathologist uncovers the fact that the person was melted alive using lye crystals activating by his sweat and tears.  A sinister conspiracy arises.  It’s a really thought-provoking mystery.  The original novel was by Zygmunt Miloszewski.  This production also starred Jonathan Keeble, Mina Anwar, Olwen May, Isabel Thompson, Georgia Devain, Tamsin Wickremeratne, Ryley Nixon, and Beatrice Webb.  It was directed by Polly Thomson, produced by Eloise Whitmore, executed produced by John Dryden, and was a Naked production.