Sunday, February 16, 2020

2019 Golden Weevil Awards


I’m managing to start this just after the Oscars, so maybe I can get it out reasonably early in 2020?  We can only hope!

See the caveat from previous years:

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

Carolyn Pickles

I don’t know that Carolyn Pickles still performs in radio drama; however, if you look at her back catalogue you can see she has appeared in untold numbers of roles, usually smaller parts, over nearly twenty years.  While it’s relatively rare to find her playing the lead, I realized that she is a good actor, whether taking the lead or as a “character actor,” and it was time to acknowledge this.  In the past, I heard her in such dramas as Katie Hims’ Black Eyed Girls (2017), The Wyndham Case (2001), The Recall Man (2001), Five Summers and Johnny Onion (2005), Keeping Ann-Marie (2003), The Divine Comedy (2014), Don’t Look Now (2001), and just as I was starting to keep a log of radio drama that I listened to, The Deep Blue Sea by Terence Rattigan in 2009, where she and Anton Lesser did justice to a most British drama of repression and relationships. 
In 2019, however, she was in top form in no less than four dramas heard throughout the year on Radio 4 Extra.  These included her taking the role of the eccentric and damaged love interest Alison in Melissa Murray’s Pass the Parcel (2005), starring again opposite Anton Lesser.  She was the pivotal character Imelda in Melissa Murray’s The Inheritance from 1999.  Simon Bovey, a radio dramatist for whom I have great respect given he wrote The Voice of God in 2006, wrote The Launch in 2002, which starred Pickles as Elizabeth.  During the Second World War, Jack Avery (Trevor Peacock) was a young pilot, along with his brother Alan.  He watched flying ace Bingham (Ronald Pickup) shoot his brother’s plane.  Incensed and insistent that justice should be done, Jack works tirelessly for decades to bring Bingham to justice (as he sees it).  Everyone around him denies that this could have happened.  When, at last, his tale is told in an exposé book published by Paul Katz (Ewan Bailey), he is surprised to be met face-to-face with Bingham.  Jack’s bitterness has affected every aspect of his life, such that his relationship with his daughter Elizabeth is fraught.  She argues that Jack’s crusade has drained any evidence of the real Alan from life, so that she doesn’t even know the kind of her person that her uncle was.  At the book launch, Jack also meets Herman Wulff (Christopher Godwin), who was also flying at that time—albeit on the other side.  The message which Jack must absorb—and believe me, throughout the drama it’s really touch and go whether he will actually absorb this or not—is forgiveness.  Finally, Pickles played another Liz in the fantastic Grace and the Angel (2001).  For more on that, please keep reading.

Andrew Wincott

In 2003, Bruce Young (see below) directed an adaptation by Gerda Stevenson of Mary Brunton’s novel Self-Control.  I had mixed feelings about the drama—Jane Austen found the novel well-intentioned and well-written but the plot totally improbable. I would have to agree, and in some ways it feels much more like a parody of Mrs Radcliffe’s romances, without being overtly Gothic.  Nevertheless, I was much impressed by Andrew Wincott’s performance as anti-hero Colonel Hargrave.  One can’t help feeling a little sorry for Hargrave, as his passion flies off the pages of this book; Wincott gives the role everything he’s got, despite it being an opportunity to chew the scenery, and the heroine Laura, despite the author’s best efforts, being a little trying as a person.

Sean Pertwee

Sean Pertwee doesn’t do much radio drama, so it’s always an event when he’s in a role.  Burning Both Ends:  When Oliver Reed Met Keith Moon from 2011 was a wonderful comedy, and Pertwee memorable as Oliver Reed (Arthur Darvill equally memorable as Keith Moon).  Reed is isolated as the premiere British star of his age; never trained as an actor and veering between confident bluster and insecurity, he deplores the falseness of Hollywood.  Keith Moon, meanwhile, is simply mental, going through life as one chaotic game after another.  Together, they spell destruction and devil-may-care for the rest of the world, but for each other, it’s the ultimate bromance (if you have to employ such a wretched term).

David Harewood

Time Hops by Alan Gilbey and David Richard-Fox was a madcap sci fi comedy from 1994.  It’s debatable how well it’s aged, but what is not debatable is David Harewood’s larger-than-life performance as RV101, a rabbit warrior from the future.  Time Hops is the unlikely story of EK6, a mouse-scientist from the future, and her pursuer, RV101, a rabbit-warrior, also from the future. 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.  Eek went back to 1994 where she met surly teenager Steph, her younger brother Max, and local rabble-rouser Baz.  The majority of the next four episodes sees RV101 and Baz in pursuit of Steph, Max, and Eek as they hop through time.  Aside from the cop-ot ending, this comedy was very fun. 

Michael Mears

Although now 20 years old, I had to highlight A Slow Train to Woking, written and performed by Michael Mears. Mears convincingly played 28 separate characters in this dark comedy, and did so beautifully, to the point where you forgot it was a man performing in falsetto the role of his mother singing hymns in a frail voice, or the train driver, or the pub landlord, or . . . Daniel takes the slow train to Woking every weekend to visit his mother, whose grip on his soul is absolute.  He takes the slow train, then a bus, so that he can delay this torture for as long as possible.  His mother calls him all during the week, too.  When his cousin Bram suggests that Daniel move his mother to a retirement community, his mother Lily responds with, “After all I’ve done for you . . .”  Impressive stuff.

Amaka Okafor

Alison Hindell’s adaptation of Renaissance play Arden of Favesham, based on a real-life murder case, was impressive. The acting was exceptional, particularly Amaka Okafor, who distinguished herself as a totally believable Alice.  Alice has been married to land-owner Arden for some time.  She also has a lover, Mosby.  Alice and Mosby are determined to eliminate Arden, and when Arden robs his neighbor Greene out of some land, the otherwise mild-mannered man now has a grudge—which Alice quickly turns to her advantage by claiming that her husband has abused her, and Greene comes to her rescue.  What is also very interesting is to follow Alice’s, Mosby’s, and Arden’s various machinations, whereby they are able to convince themselves or each other of things they knew to be utterly false moments ago (much like Richard III).  The only disappointing thing was that, in true Renaissance morality play style, the murderers repented of their deed, seconds after Alice had stabbed her husband savagely herself.  I would have much preferred for the killers to get on with their lives and try to evade capture; nevertheless, the actors sold this sudden remorse for all it was worth. 

Patricia Routledge

Although playing superficially similar roles—older women dealing with disappointments in life—Patricia Routledge drew great emotional depth and authenticity from two dramas heard this year.  In May Child by Elizabeth Kuti from 2004, she played Margaret, who gets a phone message from Ron, 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, 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.  

Sound Barriers by Sarah Daniels from the following year is a fantastic drama, with another role played with great sensitivity by Routledge.  Each character recounts what has been happening to them in monologue, without ever interacting with each other.  I’m not a huge fan of the monologue in radio drama, but this usage was exceptional. It’s also not clear for a long time how the three characters know each other, but they are brought together in a solid, Love Actually-like fashion by the end. Audrey, played by Routledge, is an elderly lady who lives in a flat and is perturbed by her neighbor, a young professional with a new baby who cries all the time, and Ian, a deaf man.  Audrey’s story is very poignant because her daughter lives in the US, and Audrey can only visit her for a week per year.  Audrey is so lonely and depressed, she spends her time going by bus to a shopping center where she pretends she is in America, and that her daughter’s family is going to come round the corner any moment.  Ian is the deaf man who lives in the same flats as Audrey, and his perspective is a remarkable one.  He navigates life in the hearing world by lip-reading and writing on a notepad.  Eventually, Audrey and Ian realize they have been used by the desperate mother, who is unable to come to terms with the fact her baby has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and that she is an alcoholic, by helping her fulfil the requirements of her social worker, Jenny.  Can any happy ending be earned by these characters?  The drama is remarkable and so is Routledge’s performance. 

Outstanding Directors

Melanie Harris

Melanie Harris has directed many radio dramas.  She directed both instalments of Val McDermid’s private eye Kate Brannigan stories from 1998 and 1999 respectively, Clean Break and The Right Chemistry. While I preferred Clean Break, both were stylish, well-made thrillers.  Brannigan, a Manchester-based investigator, spent the first story investigating insurance fraud and trying to get back priceless paintings (and fakes).  In the second story, she and her lover Richard investigated blackmail at a chemical factory.  I liked Brannigan; a fun, capable character, second only to Kathleen Turner’s VI Warshawski, brought alive by Harris’ directing. 

Bruce Young

I’ve heard many, many radio dramas directed by Bruce Young.  He received a Golden Weevil in 2017, and you can read about a fraction of his productions in that entry.  I am highlighting here specifically a drama from 2015, Rachel’s Cousins by Ann Marie Di Mambro.  Rachel (Tamara Kennedy) is a Glasgow lawyer who has just had a double mastectomy after having had breast cancer.  The only person she can confide in is her colleague and lover, the married Alex (Alan McHugh).  A chance encounter brings her into contact with her cousins, Glaswegians on the opposite class spectrum from Rachel.  Arrested for disturbing the peace and assaulting a police officer, there’s enmity between Rachel and her cousins Marilyn (Gabriel Quigley), Josie (Karen Bartke), and Shirley (Sarah McCardie).  The drama (with a large dose of comedy) follows the difficult and painful reconciliation between Rachel and her cousins, each of whom has their various crosses to bear, as she implores them to get tested to find out if they share the same gene as she does, which could lead to their developing breast cancer like she did.  It was entertaining to hear Rachel’s restrained accent become a lot broader the more she identified with her lower class Glaswegian cousins, and it’s a testament to Bruce Young’s casting abilities that he made each of these characters sound distinctive, rather than “just a bunch of Glaswegian women” or, heaven forfend, “a bunch of Scottish women.” 

Karen Rose

Karen Rose produces drama for Sweet Talk Productions, and thus she presided over two very good dramas, in my opinion, in 2019.  The first was The Not Knowing by Daniel Maier.  It was difficult not to get involved with the characters in this very radiogenic story.  It used time the way the human mind can:  rapidly moving forward to 10 minutes from now, or thirty years, imagining all kinds of outcomes for situations which are purely imaginary—yet realistic to be believable. The drama focuses on ten minutes in the life of a mother, Harriet (Louise Brealey), whose toddler goes missing in a crowded grocery store.  Her marriage to Alex (Mark Bazeley) is already unravelling, and Harriet imagines all kinds of ways for it to finally hit the rocks, inventing for herself a therapist (Pippa Haywood).  The drama keeps the listener guessing and so emotionally involved that ending evinced palpable belief. 

Making Plans with Nigel was another drama Karen Rose produced.  It was a funny and entertaining semi-autobiographical dark comedy by Stuart Houghton, who uses his diagnosis with breast cancer in 2016 as the jumping off point for a flight of fancy.  Houghton is played here by Mark Benton, who begins the story at a pub where Stu has been meeting with his comedy writing group.  He would do anything to have a drama on Radio 4, he says.  Be careful what you wish for, he also says.  Not realizing (as I didn’t!) that men could also get breast cancer, Stu ignores the lump in his breast until he finally works up the courage to go to the doctor (Emma Fielding).  He begins a series of tests until he gets his diagnosis from Mr Kashap (Paul Bazely).  Struggling to tell his wife Natalie (Sally Lindsay) and worrying about the impact of the diagnosis on his kids, Stu is also tormented by the tumour which has taken on the persona of Nigel Farage (Lewis MacLeod).  It’s harrowing stuff, but it also written in a way that is very funny, with Nigel constantly haranguing Stu, and Stu repeatedly having self-deprecating interior monologues.  Stu opts for chemo after being advised on the odds by his oncologist Ben (John Ramm) and counts himself lucky compared to Fiorentina (Becky Wright), an Italian lady trapped by her condition whose mother also has breast cancer. The story has a happy ending (if only Brexit did, too).  Well-cast and well-directed, Making Plans with Nigel tread the thin line between anguish and emancipation. 

Polly Thomas

In 2019, I heard two wonderful dramas directed by Polly Thomas, one from 2000 and one from 2019, a Naked Production. The latter was Rage, a Mark Lawson adaptation of an acclaimed Polish crime thriller written by Zygmunt Miloszewski.  The characters were wonderfully idiosyncratic, and the crime was chilling.  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.  A really thought-provoking mystery, it was produced by Eloise Whitmore and executive produced by John Dryden.  Excellent stuff; I would love to hear other Miloszewski novels adapted. 

Nearly twenty years earlier, Polly Thomas directed another kind of story, though coincidentally with strong feminist themes running through it also.  This was Crazy Big Fish by Gill Adams. 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 (how meta).  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 (Ruth Holden), 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 (Rachel Davies), and it’s hate at first sight.  Like Rita, Pauline 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 (Katy Cavanagh) 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 (Sally Walsh), a young woman who has spent most of her adult life taking care of her cantankerous, emotionally abusive, alcoholic father.    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. 

Simon Morecroft

I’m less familiar with Simon Morecroft’s work, but Ordinary Heroes by Paul Marquess and Sally Tatchell blew me away.  Newbie PC Scott Knight (Joel Phillimore) is on his first beat in Whitechapel with veteran PC Nisha Hussain (Nisha Nayar).  It seems like it’s going to be a quiet night.  However, what they don’t know (and the audience does) is that Haneefa (Susannah Fielding)  and Zeenat (Gurkiran Kaur) Khan, along with their brother-in-law Tariq (Devesh Kishore), have decided to avenge Haneefa’s husband Rassoul’s death by blowing themselves up.  It’s a nail-biting thriller and very believable, I thought; as good as any contemporary cop drama on TV.

Outstanding Writers

Amna Saleem

It’s always a joy to hear a new voice on BBC Radio and to be on the lookout for the exciting things that are going to come from them.  One such is Amna Saleem, who wrote the hilarious comedy Beta Female, produced by Ed Moorish for Somethin’ Else.  Amna has written a fictionalized version of herself; this Amna (Kiran Sonia Sawar) is a modern Asian woman who has to reconcile her background with her day-to-day living, as when she brings her boyfriend Theo (Tom Stourton) to an Eid celebration.  In pretending to be engaged to Tom, she thinks she’s pulled the wool over the eyes of her mother (Sudha Bhurchar) and father (Bhasker Patel), but neither is fooled—thinking they have to keep up the pretence to please the other, more conservative parent.  Her uncle and aunt (Anil Goutam, Nina Wadia), however, are dreadful.  Her brother Haris (Omar Raza) has rejected his British Asian status to be a regular old Scottish lad, whereas younger sister Sunnah (Amna Saleem) is much more orthodox.  It was very funny and taught me a lot about the day-to-day lives of Scottish Asian Muslims.   I am sure they must be making more episodes!

Philip Palmer

Philip Palmer got a Golden Weevil in 2016, and ever since that initial series of Keeping the Wolf Out, the 1960s Hungarian Soviet police procedural/spy thriller, I’ve been hungrily awaiting more of the same.  Thus, Palmer receives another Golden Weevil in 2019 for a further series of Keeping the Wolf Out, still starring Leo Bill and Clare Corbett as married couple Berthold and Franckisca, but with the addition of Joseph Ayre as József Szabados, Berthold’s highly suspect second-in-command.  Keeping the Wolf Out is probably some of the best crime fiction ever written.

Michael Symmons Roberts

Poet Michael Symmons Roberts has been a frequent contributor to BBC Radio.  In 2019, he wrote two excellent (and quite different) dramas.  Luke, Acts was an interesting attempt to breathe life into the distant past. I have to admit I know very little about early Christianity, about the writers of the Gospels.  Well, this drama, based on the text of the Gospel of Luke and Acts, caught me up pretty quickly.  It’s just conceivable that Luke’s letters—which form the basis for the Gospel—were written to someone called Theophila not Theophilus, so we find Luke (David Schofield) hiding out in Rome, where Theophila (Verity Henry), a Roman with some legal training, tries to help him prepare a defense for Paul, who is in prison.  Through the texts, we hear about the ministry of Jesus as well as days in the lives of Paul (Jason Done) and Peter (Shaun Mason).  Meanwhile, Luke, Theophila and her believer mother try to stay one step ahead of the rioting mob.  I quite enjoyed it and learned a lot.  It was directed by Sharon Sephton and produced by Susan Roberts.

There were oodles of audio dramas commemorating fifty years since the Moon landing, and one of them was the very clever Variations on a Theme by Neil Armstrong by Michael Symmons Roberts (directed by Susan Roberts and sharing some of the same cast members as Luke, Acts).  It tackled the surprisingly vital conspiracy theories about the hoaxed Moon landing (apparently a significantly larger percentage of British people believe these conspiracies than Americans) in a playful and self-reflexive way. Furthermore, it was allowed to have its degrees of ambiguity in a way that probably wouldn’t have worked as well in another medium.  Laura (Verity Henry) is a waitress at a thinly-disguised Epcot Center in Florida where she serves beer to tourists and nostalgic ex-pats in a fake English pub.  There, she meets conspiracy theorist and all-around tosser, Billy (Graeme Hawley), who has spent his life making money off of collectibles.  He insists that the Moon landings were faked, and nothing the increasingly exasperated Laura says can seem to convince him.  Meanwhile, con artists and identity thieves Belle (Lydia Wilson) and Luna (Laurel Lefko) are wandering around in the Nevada desert, seemingly validating Billy’s theories when they find what appears to be a life-sized Moon set—or is it?  Noel (Andonis James Anthony), who has been “playing” Neil Armstrong in monologues throughout the drama, makes an appearance at the pub in Epcot, as a Neil Armstrong lookalike as well as soundalike.  So if Noel can be a visual and aural stand-in for Armstrong, what makes him the fake?  While the drama is unequivocal on its condemnation of conspiracy theories, the way it plays with reality is very clever and satisfying.  

Lucy Catherine

Lucy Catherine is recognized here for two recent radio dramas and one from nearly twenty years ago.  An impressive range!  In 2000, she wrote A to Z, the story of the real-life woman who conceived the A to Z maps/guides in 1936 (if you live in the UK, is omething you learn very quickly is that these guides are a British staple).  Phyllis Pearsall (Catherine McCormack) was the unconventional daughter of two eccentric parents. Her father, Alexander Gross, was a Hungarian map-maker, imperious, uncompromising, and highly conservative.  Her mother was a hypochondriac British woman (Phyllida Law), and some time before 1936, Gross had moved to the US, and the couple had separated.  Insisting on running her father’s map-making business, Phyllis spent her time trudging through London’s streets at all hours as she sketched the rabbit’s warren of streets. Naturally, all of this driven, obsessive industry precludes her having “normal” relationships, leading to the breakdown of her marriage and her inability to let well-meaning Cambridge-toff-turned-communist, Len, get close to her.  It’s tragic on a personal level and makes for harrowing drama.  Nevertheless, Phyllis succeeds in finishing her map on time and finally stands up to her parents.  And the rest is history, I suppose.

At the end of 2018, Lucy Catherine adapted Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology.  While I know a fair bit about Greek mythology and am not a huge fan of Neil Gaiman (so sue me!), I found this epic drama impossible not to enjoy.  It starred Diana Rigg as a mysterious woman who tells a bedbound youngster stories of the Nine Realms.  Of course, it’s impressively cast, with Derek Jacobi as Odin.  I don’t know who Colin Morgan is, but he played a very sympathetic Loki.  The story of Fenrir (Rhashan Stone) and his sister Hel (Saffron Coomber) was very sad, actually, though it was reassuring that the storyteller told the sick child that even after the end, after Ragnarok, it was not actually the end. 

Finally, my favorite by far of these dramas was 2019’s Lights, Camera, Kidnap! directed by Sasha Yevtushenko.  Based on the true story of Sin-sen Auk (Liz Sutherland) and her husband Chue Un-Hi (Paul Courtney Hu) and how they escaped the North Korean Communist regime in the 1980s.  But it’s a lot more than that:  they were South Korea’s dream couple, she the actress, he the film director.  However, fame drew them apart.  They divorced, and it was only when Kim Jong Il (Leo Wong) had them kidnapped that they were drawn back together.  Kim Jong Il, a keen cinema-goer, also believed in the propaganda power of films.  He was certain that if Korea’s best actress and best director teamed up again in the service of the Revolution, they could change the world.  Brainwashed and brutalized after years of being separated from their families, Sen and Chue had to learn to trust each other again.  Once they did, they hatched a daring plan:  to be allowed to visit the West and defect.  A daring, fascinating, and quite stylish thriller. 

Dermot Bolger

In 2005, Dermot Bolger wrote a series called Haunting Women which was rebroadcast on Radio 4 Extra in 2019.  These were all dramas based on Irish legends of the supernatural, which each involved a female ghost, and all of them were quite evocative and compelling, some creepier and more disturbing than others.  They also provided a chance for the same cast members to play a lot of different characters.  The only one of the famous Irish female ghosts I’d ever heard of was the one haunting the linen mill (based on a documentary in 2017, she’s still haunting that mill).  Each drama was only 15 minutes long, so Bolger’s writing had to enable them to pack in a lot of story.  Generally this was done by having one character telling another about what happened in the past, which is what happened in “The Linen Mill.”  Scarier was “The Shimmering Dress,” a beautiful ward named Cecilia in rural 18th century Ireland was trying to fend off the unwanted advances of a local squire.  She determined to leave Ireland for London because the stress was too much to bear.  However, just before she was to leave, her guardian was called away—on a fabricated fool’s errand, it turned out—and her servants were tricked into leaving her unguarded.  The climax was deferred when the listeners were suddenly transferred to the present day, with an old man telling his granddaughter the story of the empty house, burned down when he was a child, that used to house Cecilia’s and the squire’s phantoms.  I’ve never heard this particular legend before, but it makes a terrific, if violent, story. “The Waiting Wall” was not so much scary as it was generally unsettling.  This one involved a grandmother and granddaughter visiting a village, once again in rural Ireland.  The granddaughter discovered that her grandmother’s sister had been the one who had said she was going to get out and travel.  Instead, she took a ride home from an English salesman and was so upset about being compromised (with her sweetheart waiting patiently by the churchyard wall) that she killed herself.  She wasn’t buried on consecrated ground, naturally, so she haunted the churchyard wall.  Thus, the living sister came back and shared all her travels with the girl who ultimately never left home.  The Riding Crop” was probably my favorite, with a Gothic, Romantic, macabre edge that also reminded me of William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”—and the true story of Hannah Beswick.  In the frame story, Sharon, a cataloguer of a seminary archive, is trying to find out why a jewelled riding crop is still in the library, as they go through their valuation of the property before selling it.  The story is this:  Beatrice, a landed lady in the “big house,” threatens to disinherit her younger sister Lucinda if she marries Anthony (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.  But is Beatrice more threatening dead than she was alive?  All of these impressive tales from Dermot Bolger.

Sheila Goff

I previously mentioned Grace and the Angel by Sheila Goff.  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).  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. The abstract and otherworldly does, indeed, meet the mundane in this drama, with Grace insistent that Angel can’t be her angel.  Meanwhile, her childless neighbors, Rosie (Carolyn Jones) and Vernon (Jonathan Kydd) and Liz (Carolyn Pickles) and Derek (Sean Baker) are thrown together (due to clumsy Angel’s inexpert landing which tangles him up in power lines). The four neighbors are all middle-aged, but Liz reveals to Rosie that she’s pregnant—and scared.  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).
Whew!  Roll on 2020 and more fantastic audio dramas!

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