AudioBooksReview: BBC Radio 4

Showing posts with label BBC Radio 4. Show all posts

Resistance by Val McDermid

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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Buy Resistance

A Touch of Frost by R. D. Wingfield

BBC Radio 4 Full Cast Recording

Although best known now for the ITV series which ran from the early 1990s to the 2010s starring David Jason, Detective Inspector Jack Frost was the main protagonist in a gritty novel, rejected by publishers Macmillan in 1972, that R. D. Wingfield turned into a radio drama for BBC Radio 4. Currently unavailable, Three Days of Frost saw the Inspector investigating child abuse and murder in a city named Denton – a provincial locale in the grimy nowhere of the north of England. In 1982, Frost reappeared in A Touch of Frost, and a legend was created.

Starring Derek Martin as Frost, with Haydn Wood, Stephen Thorne and Alan Dudley, A Touch of Frost is very much of its time in terms of attitudes to, for example, Women Police Constables (as they were referred to then), women in general, and teenagers and their parents. But the writing is first class, full of psychological tension, gritty reality and palpable despair. Despite working on cases involving a multiple rapist, a sleazy and corrupt club owner and the distraught parents of a runaway schoolgirl, Frost gets his man in the end. He even gets his paperwork in on time – just. But not, of course, without alienating his colleagues and superiors.

Running to only just under 90 minutes, A Touch of Frost is a perfect way to while away a tedious car journey and it leaves you wishing that more of Wingfield’s work could be made available from the BBC Radio Archive.

Masterly.

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Buy A Touch of Frost

John Wyndham: BBC Radio Drama Collection

Six Full Cast Classic BBC Radio Dramatisations

Lightly dismissed as ‘middle-class catastrophes’ and ‘cosy disasters’, John Wyndham’s novels, written chiefly in the 1950s and 1960s, are still chillingly shocking and disturbing dramas that make the reader question what we, as humans, are doing to our planet and, crucially, whether we are alone in the vastness of those universes beyond our own.

The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos are probably read less now than at any time in their publishing history (although it is interesting to see that H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds is currently on one GCSE English Literature syllabus). Wyndham’s novels are, perhaps, ‘an easy read’, but much of their appeal is the way he turns upside down a tranquil world where the last thing on people’s minds is the thought that anything could prevent life from continuing as it had done since the turmoil and upheaval of the protracted end to the Second World War.

These BBC radio dramatisations are enjoyable first of all for the retelling of the novels, but then for the insight we are given into the radio writers, actors, producers and audiences at the time of the original broadcasts. The accents of the lead actors in The Day of the Triffids, for example – Gary Watson, who made his name in countless television dramas, and Barbara Shelley, famous for her Hammer Film roles (playing Bill Masen and Josella Playton) – sound to modern ears frightfully cut glass. Few actors today would even attempt such accents, but they are perfect for this post-war apocalypse (dramatised by BBC radio drama pioneer Giles Cooper and first broadcast in 1968). But that is part of the appeal of this collection.

A fascinating feature of The Day of the Triffids is that the transcriptions are episodes shortened for sale to foreign broadcasters, most of whom needed time for commercials. Anything deemed ‘inappropriate’ for a overseas audience was routinely cut. Twelve minutes of the deleted material is included here on the final CD of Triffids.

Of the other broadcasts, The Kraken Wakes, from 1998, is rather prescient in the light of the rise in sea levels through global warming. As the Thames breaks its banks and then submerges the Houses of Parliament, the listener is left realising that this modern-day Noah’s Flood is perhaps not so far-fetched.

Chocky (from 1998) is fascinating, as a schoolboy communicates with an entity from the future, a ‘girl’ (although there is only one gender on her planet) who is trying to impart the secrets of an energy source that will save the Earth from eventual destruction. Fables of Nikola Tesla’s inventions and conspiracy theories that the petro-chemical industry in the USA tried to interfere with work on the electric car all spring to mind as twelve-year-old Matthew is kidnapped, hypnotised and threatened when it is revealed that he may be the conduit for a new science emanating from a different world. The dramatisation is gripping and absorbing and John Constable’s script is excellent, building as it does to its inevitable denouement. John Tydeman produced a version for BBC Radio in 1967; it would be great to be able to hear that version too.

Perhaps the best of the six here is Dan Rebellato’s 2003 production of The Midwich Cuckoos (again, there was an earlier version by William Ingram). Bill Nighy and Sarah Parish are perfect as Richard and Janet, who are fortunate enough to stay away from the village of Midwich on the night when all the women, young and old, married and single, find themselves ‘with child’. Controversial for its time, and disturbing still today, issues of abortion, eugenics and egg-sharing are not far from the surface of this intriguing and disturbing mystery, displaying just how current Wyndham still is in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Essential.

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Buy John Wyndham: BBC Radio Drama Collection

The Cinderella Killer by Simon Brett

Dramatised by Jeremy Front: BBC Radio 4 Full Cast Recording

If you have never treated yourself to one of Simon Brett’s Charles Paris creations you have missed out on a good many hours of sheer pleasure. Bill Nighy is perfect as actor Charles Paris, perhaps just beyond his best days, struggling with ex-wife Frances (Suzanne Burden) and the always-busy-with-more-famous-clients agent Maurice (Jon Glover). ‘Hi-ho, the glamorous life!’ as Stephen Sondheim famously puts it in ‘A Little Night Music’.

Whether it is in the television or radio studio, but much more probably in provincial rep., Paris always seems to find himself in the middle of intrigue and murder, often mirroring the plot of the plays in which he manages to land a part.

In The Cinderella Killer, Paris tries his hand at provincial panto, having suffered as a department store Santa the nastiness of children grabbing his beard, poking his stomach and micturating as they sit on his lap. Surely, Maurice can find something more befitting his prodigious thespian talents and lengthy résumé.

But panto is better than nothing and Charles is soon glad-handing old mates and finding drinking buddies with new best friends. Meanwhile, things are going better with his ex and he is even making the late-night train back to town rather than staying in off-season lodgings with a dodgy seaside landlady. However, murder and intrigue are never far away. Actors are an unforgiving lot, and what with stage-door groupies and an American TV actor with a questionable history, Kensington Gore (out of place at panto time, surely) soon turns into the real thing.

This is BBC radio at its best: two hours of drama, suspense and good old dry wit worth visiting and revisiting many a time and oft. Why Bill Nighy hasn’t been knighted is a mystery. Likewise, Simon Brett, a comic genius up there with Waugh and Wodehouse.

Unsurpassed. (Until the next one.)

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Buy The Cinderella Killer