BBC Radio 4 Drama
Val McDermid, the Scottish crime writer, will need little
introduction. McDermid started her writing career as a playwright, having had
her first novel turned down by British publishers too numerous to mention (the
old story).
Her television work is well known to British audiences and Resistance is something of a treat for fans
of radio drama. It is an original radio drama, commissioned, performed and
broadcast by BBC Worldwide for Radio 4 starring Gina McKee. Developed as part
of the Wellcome Trust and Radio 4’s Experimental Stories for Radio initiative – an annual two-day
workshop in which radio writers and producers work with researchers to develop
dramas to pitch to Radio 4 –
Resistance certainly fulfils the
Trust’s brief, which is ‘to ask big questions that are stimulated by biomedical
research … to reach
people who aren’t usually interested in traditional science programmes’.
And it would be difficult to get much bigger than the apocalyptic
devastation caused by factory-farmed meat that produces a pathogen resistant to
all the antibiotics created since their discovery revolutionized medicine in
the early days of the twentieth century.
Like many a good drama, Resistance
is grounded in verisimilitude: resourceful tenacious reporter Zoë, who just happens to be
vegetarian; rain-soaked English music festival; ‘pop-up’ food stalls selling poorly
sourced sausages; 100,000 hungry festival-goers and musicians from all parts of
the globe; festival organisers in denial. In the opening ten minutes we also
hear the soundtrack from a television report on the current shameful lack of
anti-microbials. It’s all slightly frenetic and, dare I say, predictable. But
it is polished BBC radio drama, in three fifty-minute episodes, that makes the
most of broadcast stereo and drives home the propagandists’ point. The outcome is
inevitably bleak, reminiscent of John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (McDermid adapted Kraken Wakes, updated to the present day, for BBC Radio 4 in May
2016). Humankind has little left; civilisation effectively eviscerated.
The cast is faultless, with Gina McKee as journalist Zoë, Jason Done as Jamie,
Nitin Kundra as Sam, Angela Lonsdale as Lisa, Henry Devas as Baz and Ashley
Margolis as Will: I hope such voices will continue to participate in audio
drama, which rarely has budgets sufficient to reward such impressive talent.
Of course, the question remains: will humankind change its
behaviour so that antibiotics can prevail? Or will we wipe out the human race
through complacency and short-term greed? Probably we won’t know until it is
much too late.
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