Quarter 4 Reviews - 016 Speculative Fiction - New

016 Speculative Fiction – New 

Appropriately enough, we round off 2019 with a Christmas story.  I was surprised by how much I enjoyed The Christmas Present and how moving I found it.  It’s very hard to write a non-formulaic Christmas drama of this kind, but by God, I think Ben Crompton has done it.  He also stars as the protagonist, Stephen, a father and husband who is not enjoying Christmas as his life is just too stressful.  He has to go away for work the week before Christmas and leaves behind his nonplussed wife, Holly (Christine Bottomley), and a daughter, Ivy (Poppy O’Brien) who wants to get to know her dad, if only he’d let her.  When Stephen misses his train, he spends the evening getting pissed in the train station bar, where he sees a very lifelike Father Christmas (Stephen Marzella).  He confesses he wishes he could go back to a time when life was slower-paced and more innocent.  Thus, the next morning he wakes up in his car as the boy of nine he used to be.  Hilarity and poignancy in equal measure ensue, which is helped by the cracking acting chops of Albie Crompton, presumably Ben’s son, as the young Stephen.  Stephen’s week as a child allows him to see everything in a new light.  I won’t spoil it, but it was a drama that was funny and heart-warming in a way that is rare to find. It was a lovely treat to listen to on Boxing Day. The Christmas Present also starred Graeme Hawley and Chris Jack and was directed by Nadia Molinari.  

And that ends Quarter 4 reviews!  As tradition dictates, the next post will be the 2019 Golden Weevil Awards.

Quarter 4 Reviews - 015 Speculative Fiction - Old

015 Speculative Fiction – Old 

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was not, strictly speaking, a radio drama; it was a dramatized reading with sound effects and specially composed music.  However, I’m including it here anyway.  While extremely faithful to the original story and therefore treating Ichabod Crane as a joke rather than serious character, and therefore adhering to the barely hidden suggestion that Brom Bones masqueraded as the Headless Horseman to scare Crane off, nevertheless the framing of the two-part piece and the mysterious music did allow for the suggestion—as the folklore of the sleepy Hudson River Valley demanded—that there were still something uncanny going on.  Martin Jarvis made a fine narrator, but he mispronounced a few American words.  The other voices heard were Ayesha Antoine, Delroy Brown, John Cummins, Gerard McDermott, Carolyn Pickles, Sophie Roberts, Nick Sayce, and Ella Smith.  The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was produced by Gemma Jenkins in 2005 with original music by David Pickvance.

Quarter 4 Reviews - 013 Adaptation - Old

013 Adaptation – Old

It would have been surprising indeed if I had disliked a dramatization of another Robert Westall novel, and indeed, I found this adaptation of The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral to be very well-made—and naturally, quite nastily scary. I think it’s safe to say it’s set in the 1980s or early 1990s in the fictional Muncaster, a northern town, where Joe Clarke (Peter Meakin) comes from a family of steeplejacks, whose firm has been hired to tidy up the towers of Muncaster Cathedral.  There’s one tower in particular with a sinister reputation.  The drama is framed very well in a non-chronological narrative, with skeptical police sergeant Allardyce (Terry Molloy) interviewing Joe in the middle of the mysterious events after a child has leapt to his death from the sinister tower.  Joe, Allardyce, and historian Reverend Morris (the particularly excellent John Webb) eventually team up to try to thwart the forces of evil.  The only thing I didn’t like in this story (and sad to say, it’s a feature of Westall’s work) was the wholly secondary presence of the only female character, Barbara Clarke (Sunny Ormonde), defined solely in her role as hysterical wife and mother.  The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral also starred David Holt, Tim Black, Richard Mitchley, Gillian Goodman, Zita Sattar, and Anthony Peddlar.  It was directed by Rosemary Watts and broadcast originally in 1996.