Radio review - Drama

Published Friday 12 May 2006 at 11:40 by Moira Petty

In the sixties, the airwave pirates, led by Radio Caroline, shook up British broadcasting and the BBC promptly gave birth to Radio 1. Four decades on, the battle is raging across the unlicensed arena of internet broadcasting, most of it music. What we need is more speech radio - but not just cheap phone-ins - and perhaps the British public thinks so too. In the first three months of the year, audience figures for Radio 1 and 2 are down, respectively 2.2% and 2.9% on the same period last year. However, Radio 4 is up 0.3% and Radio 3, which carries a reasonable features and drama content alongside the music, finds a whopping increase of 5.6%.

Radio 4, an institution unrivalled across the world, draws only about one in ten of the population. Perhaps some of the other 50 million will find it on the internet if they can pick their way through the mushrooming of new online broadcasters - airwave immigrants, you might call them. Immigration has also been a theme of recent dramas.

You can move within a community as well as into it, as HG Wells so brilliantly portrayed in his 1905 novel, Kipps, serialised with the sub-title The Story Of A Simple Soul. The tale of social mobility sprang from Wells’ own background as a lower middle class boy who gravitated upwards through education. Young Arthur Kipps (played in seamless transition from boy to young man by Miles Taylor and Bryan Dick) achieved a status beyond his apparent background through a substantial bequest.

Nowadays, if a yob with a criminal record and a penchant for turning his garden into a scrapyard was to win the Lottery, refining his vowels and taking a crash course in culture would hardly be the likely sequel. The likeable if naive Kipps set about improving himself, though, under the supervision of his snotty pal Coote (Julian Rhind-Tutt). Adeptly dramatised by Mike Walker - is he radio’s equivalent of Andrew Davies? - and produced by John Taylor, the two-parter had a charmingly vaudevillian approach with music and comic turns. But there was a Dennis Potter-esque irony to the technique with the listener suddenly plunged back into the maelstrom of wonderfully realised characters and social comment.

The outcome of Liverpudlian Mark Davies’ Another Place would have gratified any subscriber to The Guardian’s Society pages. Property developer Steve (Colin Tierney) returned to his native Liverpool having shunned it for a decade and, via redemptive scenes by the Albert Docks, came up with a scheme to let half the flats in his new project to key workers at low rents. In a good line, he was nicknamed “Steve Jones, the Prada-trousered philanthropist”. With jokes like that, no wonder Liverpool is the City of Culture. His nemesis and salvation was an old friend (Ian Hart) on whom he had once done the dirty. The play’s big theme, though, was the ineluctable pull of one’s roots.

Samina Baig was on a similar journey in her autobiographical Migrant Memory. She sought meaning in her family’s Indian heritage after the death of her older sister Bia (Shaheen Khan). A former documentary writer, Samina (played by Nina Wadia) dug deep in a lyrical tribute to Bia. The play, finally, was not about what divides communities but the cross-cultural power of grief.

Reading the last of Patricia Highsmith’s stories in Nothing That Meets The Eye, Anna Massey was familiarly incisive. Narrating her autobiography, Telling Some Tales, her voice was softer, less menace but no punches pulled. The daughter of Canadian screen star Raymond and sister of Daniel, she was never formally trained but ‘gifted’ to the stage. This great actress is also an eloquent wordsmith, generous but unflinchingly honest. Stripped of her roles, this was the real voice of Anna Massey.

Details

Kipps - the Story Of A Simple Soul - R4, from Sunday, May 7

Another Place - R4, Friday, May 12

Migrant Memory - R4, Friday, May 12

Nothing That Meets The Eye - R4, from Monday May 8

Telling Some Tales - R4, from Monday May 15