Radio Reviews

What’s this a review?  Sorry for the silence, alas work is too busy and I took on a couple of pet projects which took up my little spare time. That said… I still listened to plenty of plays and documentaries – so where to start? Smiley of course.

Well we are 5 programmes in to R4’s re rendering of John le Carré’s George Smiley, a mammoth task and one fraught with dangers.  Hanging over George Smiley is the shadow of Alec Guiness.  Anyone who saw the TV version of Tinker, Tailor and Smiley’s People see Guiness when they read the words George Smiley, including le Carré! And not just Guiness, look at the cast, Ian Richardson, Bernard Hepton, Michael Jayston, Hywel Bennett…

Enter stage left, Simon Russell Beale, will he step into ewan McGregor’s shoes and do a crappy impersonation of Obi wan for us?  Read on gentle listener.

I approached Call for the Dead with as much of an open mind as I could,  and I have to admit for the first 5 minutes this soft, inward performance didn’t seem quite right, then suddenly – it had changed, I suddenly realised this was Smiley.  A troubled, complex, man. In love, loved and loveless – his job treating him the way life does, all pitch perfect from Beale.

Now before I laud too much praise on Beale’s performance (can there be too much?) I have to just say the cast (Kenneth Cranham, Eleanor Bron, Geoffrey Palmer, Ian McDiarmid, Phillip Jackson, Maggie Steed, Ewan Bailey I could go on for ever…) adaptation and direction all reach the same heights. The plays move along well keeping plenty of detail and incedent, whilst never seeming stagey. i can give no better example than in an expository scene in A Murder of Quality between Smiley and Ailsa which literally took my breath away.  The subtlety of all concerned in presenting a scene which makes one wonder if you are eavesdropping on a conversation is incredible. After that I was eagerly awaiting the first of the Karla trilogy.

Tinker Tailor is as good as it gets I think.  Shaun McKenna deserves something in the order of a Knighthood for his masterly revision of this book.  Ewan Bailey is brilliant as Guillam, and here you will see a subtle shift away from the TV series. Young Peter Guillam is very much his own man, and whilst loyal to Smiley, still unhappy with his own mole like status in the Circus. Toby is also slightly revised more pointedly explaining his own complex role.

Strangely the most similar scenes to the TV are those of Ricky Tarr, truncated but no real change of emphasis, but then they are the scene setter, the Macguffin, there is no emotional burden laying heavily on Tarr, just simple betrayal, loss and fear.

When it comes to Ann, the TV series made he a distant object from Smiley, and was always the weaker part of the TV series. Mckenna exposes Smiley through his constant internal discourse he has with Ann (as opposed to the reality of their non communication, in once case cleverly broken by a bad line).  This exposure of Smiley’s inner thoughts,  means Ann’s infidelities (which are exposed as we hunt Gerald) seem pin sharp painful as you hear the tenor of Beales voice change.

Is it perfect, well I can’t think of anything to criticise.  Everything seems so real, so normal, you just don’t question it.  Only in A Murder of Quality, when the twist relates to the misrepresentation of someone’s personality does it jar a little, but that is a fault of the novel and it is only apparent in this version due to the normality of everything else.

So if you like le Carre, should you listen?  Well I am sure you are, but if you like radio at all – dive on in there, and look forward to some more great adaptations in 2010.

For the remainder of this review Sir Alec Douglas-Home will be referred to as Baillie Vass.

Well maybe not, but Private Eye did have fun with the PM who lasted less than a year. History does not look back too fondly on this period of the Tory parties time in power.  The government was already damaged  by Profumo and when they chose a hereditary peer as a Prime Minister in 1963 the country was not entirely convinced about this, and it seemed to represent the broken nature of the Tory government.

Based on the bizarre true events of a near kidnap of Douglas-Home as he stayed in a house near Aberdeen (with no bodyguard) make for a fascinating little play. Whilst the situation is largely true, the dialogue and resolution are spun from the imagination of Martin Jameson, and it leads to a great 40 minute play. The cast is does a great job, and Tim Mcinnery is spot on as the doubt ridden PM.

We will never know what conversation was had between the PM and the angry students that led them to abandoning their attempt (though the fact that Home believed it would lead to a Tory victory instead of Wilson was interesting). There is enough tension, and the suggestion of anger and violence to make this great drama.  What it also does is highlight the current concern of the dislocation of politicians from the public, and some relevance to the position of Mr Brown… but not too obviously, it lets the dialogue make the points.

For such a strange situation the dialogue seems very real, and whislt we can see times where issues and history are highlighted writer Martin Jameson wisely refrained from making the dialogue too ‘knowing’ which it is easy to do from 45 years distance.

Well worth a listen, and another great bit of historical drama from the BBC.

RadioArchive
http://radioarchive.cc/torrents-details.php?id=5959

Given the fact this site primarily reviews radio programmes, I expect we will see a fair bit of James Follet appearing on this site. Through the seventies and eighties he wrote dozens of radio plays, many with an SF or fantasy feel, several are crying out for a decent review. The Twisted Image is a particular favourite of mine, it feels much more like a mood piece and is not dominated by a traditional narrative with a neat ending.

Initially it has the feel of an R.D Wingfield play (Douglas Blackwell &  Peter Wickham are excellent as the policemen) but slowly it moves in a different direction.  My favourite moment is the girl telling the story of visiting the empty shopping estate and seeing the shop dummies in the living fabric centre. For this small section the story steps away from a traditional crime story into the kind of urban dark fantasy popularised by Fritz Leiber (The Smoke Ghost or Our Lady of Darkness) or Ramsay Campbell. The rest of the story is less abstract in it’s presentation but this scene sets an unsettled tone for the rest of the play.

I shall not go too much into the strange happenings in the town of Oakhanger as that will remove much of the fun of the story, but time is playing funny tricks and the detectives are given a strange glimpse of the future. The story could easily have ended up like a bad episode of the X Files but James Follett wisely doesn’t try to rationalise the stranger elements of the story, you are left wondering what strange disturbance moved through the town of Oakhanger one night. In that respect it reels more like an urban folk tale told to kids to send chills down their spine.

As I mentioned earlier both actors do a great job as the policemen and James Follett’s great dialogue moves the play along swiftly, managing to highlight the strangeness of the situation without making a meal of it.

I have several more James Follett plays I would like to review and this one is not typical, it is however my favourite of all his plays. It has a nice disquieting feel which is engrossing throughout whilst carefully walking the line between horror and SF and cleverly avoiding both traps.

Grab it now..

Radioarchive link
http://radioarchive.cc/torrents-details.php?id=4488

James Follet info site
http://www.jamesfollett.dswilliams.co.uk/