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Radio review - drama

Published Monday 17 November 2008 at 19:05 by Moira Petty

Oh, for comic timing. Not that blissful alchemical process by which some actors use intuition, rhythm and stardust to rib-tickling effect. I’m referring here to the good luck of all involved in a radio comedy drama to tap into a zeitgeist which hasn’t vanished down the plug hole by the time it goes to air.

Clive Coleman’s six-parter Spending My Inheritance was clearly intended to address the impolite notion that 30 and 40-somethings are casting covetous eyes at their parents’ final salary pensions and the sky is the limit value of their mortgage-free properties.

Somewhere between Coleman typing ‘The end’ and transmission of the first episode, the credit crunch storm blew in. So the idea of a senior member of the golf-playing classes and his wife releasing equity on their house for a grey pound-splurging spree while their debt and responsibility-ridden middle-aged son looks on in horror, seems merely fanciful.

Now, perhaps I’m jumping the gun here. So far, Brian and Liz (Kenneth Cranham and Judy Parfitt) haven’t actually got round to the equity release, but they are showing a superhuman dedication to the good life and their son Harry (Kris Marshall) is tearing his hair out as he attempts to live up to the expectations created by their other, careerist, son. So maybe later on we’ll find out if a bit of crunchy credit has been written into this scream of inter-generational angst.

In the meantime, Marshall jumps around jabbering so hyperactively as Harry that I can hardly blame his parents if they do go on a spend, spend, spend mission destined to leave him nothing. I can be laughed into submission over most things, but another five weeks of far from hilarious Harry might have me contemplating hara-kiri.

Notwithstanding an event as bizarre as the discovery of Hitler’s acerbically Anglophobic foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, living in a genteel English suburb - yes, I know that would mean he was 118 and had risen from the dead - current affairs were never likely to be a spoke in the wheel of Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran’s delicious Jewish comedy, Von Ribbentrop’s Watch.

If you wanted comic timing in action, this 90-minute delight was the place to come. Allan Corduner’s Gerald, a cash-strapped Jewish wine merchant, set the scene as he appraised his convert wife’s preparations for Passover. It seems a bit excessive in the age of Richard Dawkins, he tells her, to be feather-dusting the kitchen for signs of forbidden leavened bread. Everything kicked off over the Passover meal when it was revealed that Gerald had been offered a lot of money for his late father’s watch, newly discovered to have once belonged to Ribbentrop. Harriet Walther, as Gerald’s wife, delivered rationalism with a wittily caustic undertow. But it was Miriam Margolyes who stole the show with her comic riffs - just as she did some years ago as Miss Prism in a radio production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Marks and Gran have come up with a great comic creation in Lila, Gerald’s kvetching, Schnapps-swigging mother. While cultural and familial concerns were explored, at the heart of the play was an ethical dilemma about the future of the controversial watch. It seems entirely appropriate that it should have been Lila who ended all debate by smashing the timepiece to smithereens.

Michael Morpurgo’s book War Horse - life and death on the Western Front in the First World War, as seen through the eyes of a farm horse - was a moving testament to the healing ability of animals. The piece was enhanced and energised by John Tams’ beautiful folk tunes.

DETAILS

Spending My Inheritance - Radio 4, from Monday, November 17

Von Ribbentrop’s Watch - Radio 4, Saturday, November 8

War Horse - Radio 2, Saturday, November 8

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