Radio review - Drama

Published Tuesday 29 July 2008 at 10:55 by Moira Petty

Too many crass TV mysteries have left me like a sufferer of some nervous complaint, twitchily suspicious of every character who strays across the screen before lapsing into jaded cynicism. Peter Whalley tapped into this lost innocence with his thriller The Test in which a man, implicated 20 years before in the murder of his neighbour, had now been asked to take a DNA test which he was refusing.

Whalley then spun a narrative without vertiginous twists of the plot but with sufficient false trails to construct a palpable air of menace. Whalley ingeniously tapped into his audience’s tainted gullibility to allow us to leap to conclusions, but forensic examination proved his story to be free of the kind of silliness that leaves you tutting and wishing you hadn’t expended your time.

David Bamber fused an edge of desperation with plodding normality as the husband whose wife (Denise Black) believed she had driven him to murder. The DNA test scared him because it would prove his innocence, not his guilt, and thereby dissipate his hold on his marriage. Skilfull plotting and the subversion of our expectations would not have been enough but Whalley provided an intriguing expose of the unspoken pact which had seen this pair cling to each other for so long. I rather wish he hadn’t gone for the hysterical ending, in which the husband cut his throat in order to inflict a life-long guilt trip on his wife, but the 59 minutes which preceded the finale were not wasted.

The tension was not misdirected either in Clare Bayley’s The Secret Place, in which a prison visitor (Helen Longworth, whose softly-spoken idealist invited admiration rather than scorn) married a convicted murderer (Paul Hilton in a terrifying performance). The heady beauty of the riverside setting where they were alone together and the revelation of his true psychotic self was enough to ramp up the blood pressure.

Art didn’t come to the rescue and offer a happy ending - death row lovers can be blinded by what they want to see, we were told. Bayley was vague about the man’s crimes and improbably allowed the justice system to release him after glossing over his appeal. Yet you had to be a nit-picker to take offence in view of how she welded the thriller elements to ethereal sequences in which the pair met in their dreams, like something out of a Chagall painting.

Peter Jukes’ witty and gritty drama, Bad Faith, about a police chaplain who has had it with God and decides to test the Almighty’s patience, also had moments of surrealism. Lenny Henry, as the padre gone native on the urban steets of his patch, took the humour, the moral interrogation and the flights of fancy in his stride, in a performance which confirmed his acting credentials.

I Wish to Apologize for My Part in the Apocalypse was a reverie about love, the moon coming to earth and the end of the world. Logic was suspended - I bathed in its batty atmosphere and the whimsical performances by Bill Nighy, out of this world as ever, and Amelia Bullmore, who was unusually rhapsodic.

I came back to earth with a bang with Blaze by Ann Marie Di Mambro, a play which juggled with Far East sweat shops, entrepreneurial ambition and a matrimonial crisis, running between each element like a demented circus act. Marriage guidance counsellors might have been startled to learn that, unusually, all this stress served to save the troubled union but then the characters had sounded like cartoon cut-outs from the business pages all along.

DETAILS

The Test - R4, Saturday July 19

The Secret Place - R4, Friday July 25

Bad Faith - R4, Wednesday July 30

I Wish To Apologize For My Part In The Apocalypse - R4, Thursday July 17

Blaze - R4, Thursday July 24