Radio review - Drama

Published Monday 30 July 2007 at 12:55 by Moira Petty

I particularly loved the first episode of Jane Purcell’s romp through several decades of girls’ comics, 43 Years in the Third Form, as it depicted fifties life like a David Lynch film. On the surface was a spurious respectability, which could be cracked at any time.

Young Elizabeth knew that. Her family was like Janet and John with added schizophrenia. Her father was sometimes brought home in a police car. He was understood to be ‘soft in the head.’ Elizabeth’s mother had morphed into a harridan, desperate to prop up the gender divide. Elizabeth was expected to iron her brother’s shirts and make toffee for his tuck box. She would rather have been rummaging in the engine of her father’s car and wished she was going off to boarding school. She waved her brother off after putting laxative in his toffee, then noticed how scared all the other new boys looked. Her brother had worries too: “Expectations,” he whispered.

There it was - the sex war in a nutshell. Elizabeth took succour from Girl magazine which, with its call to readers to become ‘star adventurers,’ entertained an emancipated sub-text. Not that feisty Elizabeth needed much help - she was clearly in training to become Germaine Greer or a Kwik Fit mechanic. Which would it be? The last episode, we were promised, would see her reading Girl and Bunty with her granddaughter. Alas, my preview CD ended after episode three, meaning that I also never heard about ‘the unusual and spooky’ Misty magazine of the eighties.

Dramatisations of the famous strips like The Four Marys and Angela the Air Hostess were threaded through the stories along with agony page dilemmas. They merged seamlessly with the narrative, just as they did in real life. Chris Wallis’ production featured a large cast including Sharon Duce, Jenny Lee, Coleen Prendergast and Alison Pettit - but not a single cliche.

If girls’ comics can be seen as plotting the journey of women, the journeys of two nations were looked at in the India and Pakistan ‘07 season, marking 60 years since partition. Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A, dramatised by Ayeesha Menon, is unfolding - the series runs until August 10 - as a universal tale of hope. Taking in the raucous sounds of Mumbai, where it was recorded with an Indian cast including Anand Tiwari, Rajit Kapur and Kenneth Desai, it is the absorbing tale of a street boy whose experiences help him to keep winning a TV quiz.

What would this resourceful orphan have thought of the artist featured in Icarus Falling by Jonathan Davidson, who is haunted rather than inspired by the ghosts of his early success. Wishing to see landscape painting from a different perspective, he becomes fixated on gliding but can never escape his inner misery.

Space travel only increases our derangement if Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi classic Solaris, adapted by Hattie Naylor, is any guide. All the rules have changed - a dead wife (Joanne Frogat) is reincarnated and Ron Cook’s newcomer to a space station squares up to Tim McMullan’s mad scientist. But who cares what was going on? It was the superb soundtrack by Alice Trueman and Polly Thomas’ evocative production which were the atmospheric stars here.

It was the joyful casting of Michael Chaplin’s A Two Pipe Problem that made this actors’ retirement home mystery a triumph. Richard Briers and Stanley Baxter, having unhappily played opposite each other as Holmes and Watson, lived out the roles for real with much harrumphing after Ken Campbell’s ventriloquist’s doll went missing. Stir in Wendy Richard and Elizabeth Spriggs and you have an acting masterclass.

DETAILS:

43 Years in the Third Form - R4, from Monday, July 23

Q&A - R4, from Monday, July 30

Icarus Falling - R4, Wednesday, July 25

Solaris - R4, from Sunday, July 29

A Two Pipe Problem - R4, Monday, July 23