The Stage

Radio - Drama

Published Wednesday 1 February 2012 at 17:48

There are downsides to creating musical anthems, as Chumbawamba have spent their whole anarcho-punk career finding out - not least when UKIP annexed Tubthumper, aka I Get Knocked Down, as its theme song.

One of the many great things about this band is that they always manage to have the last word, succinctly describing Nigel Farage as “an arse”. They spent the $100,000 paid by General Motors for the use of their song Pass It Along in a TV advert to fund a campaign against GM’s environmental record.

The band’s Alice Nutter is now a successful stage and TV writer. Her first radio play for R4 in 2008, Snow In July, was a grittily moving indictment of a factory in Leeds which used asbestos whose filaments used to fill the air and the lungs of locals. Now she has returned to radio with My Generation, described as a “family saga covering four decades”, which had me nervously anticipating a Hovis-ad glow of cobbled streets and cotton mills. But the theme here is the evolution of the protest movement, one on which she is well qualified to comment.

This R3 play, at two hours, is long - but not L-O-N-G as in the street slang sense, as she has divided it into four stories, taking place in 1977, 1984, 1992 and 2011. Perhaps the most compelling is the first tale of how Cath defines and redefines her feminist ideology while bringing up two children with Mick. There is some initial confusion as the action moves backwards and forwards in time but Jo Hartley’s resolute performance as Cath anchors these scenes. Set in Leeds, the backdrop is the fear created by the Yorkshire Ripper, which the ‘separatist feminists’ used as a reason to expunge men entirely from their lives. All this, and life in various communes, is utterly convincing.

I felt quite sorry for Mick, whose story is about being one of Arthur Scargill’s ‘flying pickets’, and who is played by Jason Done as bluffly big-hearted but is nevertheless questioned by police hunting the Ripper for the crime of wearing a beard. Cath and Mick’s son Ben takes centre stage in the next section in which he runs away to join the rave culture and, again, Nutter’s writing has all the details spot on, including the sharp-as-tacks traveller Carmel he impregnates and who tells him he doesn’t have a life, he just follows hers.

Here, politicisation has become blurred with hedonism but it is in the final story about Ben’s sister, Emma, that the perils of a materialistic culture comes shockingly to roost, although it spawns a new generation alive to the corporate threat. Nutter has sensed that only now, with the Occupy The Streets global movement, has protest resurfaced after nearly 25 year of dormancy. Written with confidence and humour, the play features original music by Chumbawamba’s Harry Hamer, who had to fight for audio space beside the signature tracks which signposted the various eras.

Pearse Elliott’s play for The Wire is very much of its time. Zurich features two friends on their annual pilgrimage to see AC/DC but one, wheelchair bound for years, plans to end his life in a clinic there. Conleth Hill and Patrick FitzSymons are laddish and then gruffly emotional in an exquisite piece about friendship.

Michael Eaton’s series of short plays, Dickens In London, charting the development of the writer, unfortunately veers into theme park territory. The young Dickens strolls through the metropolis bumping into the characters that were to inspire him. Gone is the neglect, misery and oppression he charted. This is cod Dickens, jolly characters ready for a knees-up and perhaps a rendition of I Get Knocked Down.

My Generation, R3, Sunday February 5

Zurich, R3, Saturday, February 4

Dickens In London, R4, Monday February 6

Moira Petty