The radio play

First current interest of mine is the Med and middle-east from when Easter was decided at Whitby Abbey through to the time Norman and the Conquest family landed near Hastings:

My second field of exploration is the radio play revisited:

Those few discerning chappies and chapesses who’ve been following these radio plays will have noticed some curious things concerning ads and where said folk have been watching/listening from (mum’s the word on the implications).

Having said that, this evening the film version of Paul Temple (1946) was scheduled but think I’ll run Wimsey instead, whilst leaving the url for those still wishing to view the film version with its fuzzy vision and sound.  There’s also PD’s Ngaio Marsh in the wings for later in the programme.

And now a critique of PT and the Radio Play form

Whilst, in the day, the family may have clustered around the bakerlite, eagerly imbibing every word, today’s aficionados are more likely to require an “adless” continuum to lie back on the bed and enjoy.  The radio play concept is a good one ioho, it hits the spot.  

Jury is out though on audio reading. I simply can’t see the point, even if it’s Hickson reading Marple. Maybe it comes down to some things coming through better visually, some aurally.  Readings seem such a cheapo copout to me and I for one shan’t bother if it’s all the same to you.

The radio play though … ah … now that makes sense, if done well and to be fair, the old Beeb, before it went full Woke, was pretty darned good at putting these together.  Yet even here, modern Wokeness invades our space.

This last one I listened to was from 2011 and that’s getting pretty “modern”, long after the cultural slide had started and the Beeb was in full horror mode.

Yet credit where it’s due … they really did have a good crack at it … the killer was in the underlying Woke attitudes of producer, director and writers.  The Woke disease poisons everything today.

I never realised, while writing my semi-fiction, just how near-impossible it is to get the male-female relations right … for the man to step up to the mark, yet still listen to her, heed her:

… and for her to understand that there really are places too dangerous for the female, particularly when she is expected to be the one in support in the shadows with the revolver, unfactored-in by the baddy. She steps in and saves the day.  I’m absolutely fine with that.

What I groan over is his telling Steve (ridiculous name for a woman anyway, whatever the purported justification) to stay out of it, to stay in the car, not unlike speaking to a child … and her putting up with that.

And yet, this was 2011 Beeb man/woman trying to imagine just how sexist pig 1946 man was.  So all this guff was swirling around on top of the plot.  It must have been very difficult for the feminazis at the Beeb.

Despite references to past episodes, plus the formulaic nature of the plotlines, they did not do a bad job … they resisted the temptation to ham it up and that was good.  Hamming something up = ego.

The radio play overall?  Once you have the egregious ad situation sorted … yes please to the radio play. It’s a nice, late at night form.  I could even imagine Paul and “Steve” themselves lying there in bed, listening last thing before zzzzzzzz.