Radio Review

Published Tuesday 6 May 2008 at 10:30 by Moira Petty

So it wasn’t a romantic death after all. The tragic suicide of an apparently brilliant young poet, investigated in Chatterton - The Allington Solution, was just a simple case of the pox.

In his first play for Radio 4, author Peter Ackroyd pitted hard-drinking, cynical academic, Jeremy Allington, against the myth of the mid-18th century writer Thomas Chatterton.

Twenty years after his death at 17 in 1770 of arsenic poisoning in the face of poverty and despondency, Chatterton became the poster boy for Romantic poetry. In the 21st century, Allington (played with raw scepticism by Adrian Scarborough) is a poster boy only for the power of alcohol to wash away life’s disappointments. He doesn’t have a romantic bone in his body, but he can smell ambition in others like a pig after truffles. Fired up by contempt for his smoothy head of department (David Timson) who subscribes to the received wisdom about Chatterton, he unearths evidence to shows that the young man was far from poor and anything but gloomy about his prospects.

The action switched between the contemporary period and Chatterton’s last days, with the young poet - who famously forged verses thought to have been written by the 15th century monk, Thomas Rowley - played in excitable form by the excellent Benedict Cumberbatch. The arsenic, deduced literary sleuth Allington, was bought to cure a venereal disease but something went wrong in its self-administration.

Ackroyd explored the effect of Chatterton’s death on his literary peers in his 1987 novel Chatterton and in this play displayed an intimacy with the material that was very seductive.

If familiarity breeds contempt, that could be one reading of the entertaining but explosive conclusions drawn by Paul Watson in How Now TV, his second play in April for R4, after his debut with An Unhappy Countess. He is, of course, the seminal documentary maker whose fingers were burned last year in an unfair wrangle about his depiction on ITV of the death of an Alzheimer’s sufferer.

His latest play was a searing satire of the depths to which TV will go. A go-getting young TV wannabe (Victoria Shalet) used her pharmaceutical tycoon father’s contacts in Africa to get a toe hold in an unnamed country’s Death Row. The hideous reality show which ensued had viewers voting for the African family they like best, whose condemned husband/father was then reprieved from execution. Unlikely perhaps, but who would have thought racist bullying would break out on a British TV show and spark a political row on two continents?

Watson’s play was very pacey, with a lot of narration-with-attitude scene setting. I couldn’t decide if the suicide of the girl’s father, in a gay love tragedy, was ‘too much already’ or cleverly hyperbolical. The strength of the drama lay in Watson’s commentary on the TV industry. “Decisions are made by big egos in little rooms.” Ouch! “TV is full of people keeping their jobs warm for their privately-educated children.” Ouch!

TV insiders may very well have felt like pin cushions by time the play reached its denouement, a Munch-type scream of anguish.

Damian Lewis struggled to convince in The Small Back Room, the saga of World War II scientists filmed by Powell and Pressburger in 1948. The film noir style of the movie didn’t translate to radio as the plot was dull, full of stiff upper lips bristling as they slammed office doors. And while the film had its expressionist whisky bottle scene to denote the hero’s struggle with alcohol, here Lewis’ character sounded as though a cuppa with two sugars would save the world.

DETAILS

Chatterton - The Allington Solution - R4 Thursday, May 1

How Now TV - R4, Friday, April 25

The Small Back Room - R4, Saturday, April 26