Radio Review - Drama

Published Monday 21 April 2008 at 16:00 by Moira Petty

No wonder there’s so little stimulating, original writing on television these days - most of the dramatic effort goes into spin, presentation and rows that can wreck careers while hinging on the definition of one word. The documentary maker Paul Watson, whose career stretches back to The Family in 1974, became embroiled in controversy last summer over whether ITV’s Love’s Farewell actually showed the death of Alzheimer’s sufferer Malcolm Pointon, or not.

As Malcolm’s wife Barbara told me not long ago, filming ceased three days before his death, but both she and Watson understood “death” to be a process which, in such a case, takes place over days and weeks and not in an instant. So, what does all this have to do with radio? Claiming that no one in television has spoken to him since then, Watson has found a welcome in radio, specifically with the independent Pier Productions.

His first project, An Unhappy Countess, has been teasingly described as “a documentary in the past”. The fact that it occupied the prestigious 60-minute Friday-evening drama slot on R4 spoke volumes. While R3 regularly blurs the boundaries of different genres, R4 prefers to fuse them into that F1 hybrid, the drama-documentary, which generally turns out to be like a Crimewatch reconstruction but with better dialogue.

Watson’s play, about the turbulent domestic and love life of Lady Strathmore and set in 1789, seemed genuinely to be trying to do something different. He didn’t just play out her life in dramatic scenes, he looked at it from the perspective of the documentary maker. And what a story it was. Sex, divorce, adultery, wife-beating, scurrilous newspaper reporting, celebrity mania - it made the home life of our own dear gossip fodder, such as Jordan or Kerry Katona, look positively restrained.

Watson has always understood that standing there with a camera changes things. So, just as with many of his TV documentaries, he made himself part of the story. He was that fly on the wall, gagging for his subjects to expose themselves. He was, perhaps, a fly with an overblown ego, a fly that spoke directly to the audience. “Imagine this,” he directed his listeners. Or, later on: “I am at court to hear the divorce petition of Lady Strathmore.” This was a fly who must have fancied himself in a wig, as it wasn’t long before he began to sound like learned counsel.

In the end, Watson’s technique worked because, however hard he tried to insinuate himself into the very centre of the story, his subject (played by Susannah Harker in an A to Z of psychiatric states) was always more arresting. The most interesting thing about her was, strangely, only revealed at the very end. The Queen is a direct descendent via her late mother.

Set in almost exactly the same year, David Ashton’s Dr Johnson’s Dictionary of Crime was distinguished by a pitch-perfect performance by that accomplished impersonator of the distinguised dead, Timothy West. We went back a century for a highly comic production of Wycherley’s Restoration masterpiece, The Country Wife, with Mark Williams a particular delight as Sparkish, the fool who slid on every banana skin thrown his way.

Finally, a fanfare for Lizzie Nunnery’s small but perfectly formed play, Tiny Chaos, which made you want to laugh and cry at the same time. She explored the world of a severely disabled, uncommunicative teenager and her unsettled but prescient young friend. The performances by Brooke Vincent and Jodie Comer were exquisite. The jaunty humour and telling melancholy of the writing made this, for me, one of the plays of 2008.

DETAILS

An Unhappy Countess - R4, Friday, April 18

Dr Johnson’s Dictionary of Crime - R4, Saturday, April 19

The Country Wife - R3, Sunday, April 13

Tiny Chaos - R4, Tuesday, April 15