Radio Reviews

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/

With seemingly endless trips everywhere recently filming people from Brighton to Edinburgh I haven’t had much time to review but a lot of time to listen. So 3 reviews in the works, here is the first…

One of the first things I hunted for when I discovered radioarchive was R. D. Wingfield’s Outbreak of Fear.  Nosing around the internet it was always mentioned as a great radio drama and gets passing mention in the biography of the famous crumpled detective Jack Frost.  I have to admit I never got on with TV’s Frost. Nothing against it, it just never clicked with me. A shame, because if it had, I may have sought out the radio versions sooner.

So when I listened to ‘Outbreak of Fear’ I had no preconceptions, no knowledge of Wingfield’s style. What I had was a tremendously good time.

What strikes one immediately is the great characters Wingfield creates.  At the centre of it is a faultless performance by Leslie Sands as Sergeant Fowler. Down to earth, gruff, sarcastic, realistic, so many things that make him human.  Don’t get me wrong this is not a small inward performance, this is a real character actor at his very best, but it is perfect.  I understand that Leslie Sands was a favourite of Wingfield (he played Frost’s on his first radio outing) and I can see why, Wingfield’s words and Sand’s performance are perfect partners.

Things are not going well in Polford (near Denton), though of course that’s not it’s real name… A man tore his own eye out to run away from an unamed fear, people butchered and bludgeoned to death. Sounds grim?  Well it is, but it’s also very funny  (thanks to the great character interactions) and suitably fantastic by the end.

The new boy, Constable Roy Beaumont (very nicely played by Nick Orchard) offers us a narrative of thoughts, as well as the occasional chilling comment on what we are about to find out.  He finds a rural police station run by Seargant Fowler, assisted by Constable Dave Clark (Cornelius Garrett) a bit of a lad and a ladies man.  They are busy dealing with wandering sheep, the odd domestic dispute and generally trying to have an easy life.  Over the course of a few days, people are murdered, the area is cut of due to a rabies outbreak, hardened criminals escape from a prison and Superintendant Chadwick (Nicholas Courtney) turns up from U.N.I.T (sorry couldn’t resist it), turns up from the County Constabulary to take charge of the investigation.

There are red herrings, cliff hangers, twists and turns before we reach the end of this real rollercoaster thriller.

What strikes one is how Wingfield manages to mix comedy and horror without having to use black comedy, it just emerges from the natural relationships of the characters. There are real laugh out loud moments here, and moments of real terror but the two never jar, never clash clumsily, just sit side by side as in real life.

Having now listened to most of R D Wingfield’s radio plays I would hesitate to call it his best, he has written so many very good drama’s I wouldn’t like to choose.  But it’s tempo and increasingly outlandish plot make it different to a lot of his work where the plots are more mundane.

The dialogue is just brilliant and combined with an excellent cast it’s hard to go criticise really.  The pace may slacken a bit at the end, but any finale to a drama with a tempo like this was bound to disappoint just a little. Nothing wrong with the ending, you simply wish you could spend another few days in Pulford.

Anyone who hasn’t heard this should really download it and maybe it will start you on a discovery of the brillaint work of R. D. Wingfield, whose string of radio plays, without exception, are an unalloyed pleasure.

Radioarchive.cc link – Outbreak of fear:

http://radioarchive.cc/torrents-details.php?id=2306

Radioarchive.cc link – various R D Wingfield

http://radioarchive.cc/torrents-search.php?search=wingfield&cat=0&incldead=0&lang=0

Having just run Rogue Male, BBC7 ran an abridged version of Rogue Justice this week. I (along with generations of others) thoroughly enjoyed the story of the ‘Rogue Male’ and was looking forward to the adaptation of the sequel.

Unfortunately it offered very little in comparison to it’s forebear. Perhaps the best example I can give of this, is when it finished today, I was expecting another 10 episodes. So flat was the ending it merely felt like the end of a chapter.

I think the easiest way to explain why Rogue Justice fails is simply to compare it to Rogue Male.

Rogue male was an intimate battle between our un-named hero and Major Quive-Smith (a German agent, never stated but implied). The hunter and hunted and a certain symmetry of character make this battle engrossing. There is tremendous suspense in the original story, and the narrative and the locations are simple and clear. The drive is the hero’s obsessions and character. The impression given in the book is that the death of his lover was more a catalyst that lead him to become a lone hunter, the personality, the character traits were already there, this is no lame Deus Ex Machina, more a revelation to the character. His symbiotic relationship with nature is a pleasure to read, and a real generator of suspense.

There are no protagonists in Rogue Justice worthy of a mention, just a few nasty Nazi’s (yes it is explicitly Germany this time) . He never pits his wits against the elements let alone someone comparable to Quive-Smith. His lover becomes the overwhelming driver for his revenge on a state, her torture almost out of Sax Rohmer.

The feel is more of an extended travelogue with an occasional fight with ‘the Germans’, a Jewish character is introduced and you feel he may become an outlet for discussions with our hero, but he is just sidelined halfway through.

I guess the main criticism is that it feels like a different character in a different kind of novel, but most importantly, and more simply, there is no suspense and no resolution.

Listenable, absolutely, it passes the time, but once you have heard the original, decidedly ersatz.

BBC7 – Rogue Justice
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hb6n4

Radioarchive torrent
http://radioarchive.cc/torrents-details.php?id=4879

Radioarchive Rogue Male torrent
http://radioarchive.cc/torrents-details.php?id=1008