The Hireling- Classic Serial, An Interior Life, A Living Death- File On Four, Cause Célèbre, Afternoon Plays- A Terrible Beauty, The People Next Door, and Crimes of Mancunia: Radio and Audio Review 27th June 2011

New Radio Four dramatisation of L.P. Hartley's "The Hireling"

BBC Radio Four’s Classic serial has been fizzing with a magnificent two part dramatisation of L.P.Hartley’s The Hireling  (Sunday 19th June, Saturday 25th June, Sunday 26th June and Saturday 4th July). Hartley seemed to specialise in catastrophic and intriguing class crossing relationships in the manner of D.H.Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

In “The Go-Between” passion vis-a-vis an already betrothed aristocrat’s daughter and the gamekeeper leads to broken hearts and suicide as well as rights of passage intensity for a young teenage boy deployed to run between the Manor and Lodge as an unwitting cupid.

Serious Money and the Art of Austerity, The Browning Version and Rattigan’s Versions, The Apple Tree and But If You Try Sometimes from the Afternoon Play, Richard the Second, Plantagenet, and the Day of the Jackal, Shalom Berlin and a Blind Date with Bloomsday. Radio and Audio Review 19th June 2011

BBC Radio Three's "Money Talks" season started with Caryl Churchill's "Serious Money"

BBC Radio Three has been providing poignant and sharply relevant drama and documentary programmes on the collapse of the domestic and global economy. This is public service broadcasting at its most anxious and perplexing.

As savings and assets evaporate in banking and property collapses, unemployment and inflation soars, and economic confidence implodes most people are helpless and powerless.

The Carhullan Army: Radio and Audio Review 4th April 2011

Listening to the radio in 1924. Illustration copyright the estate of Constance Winifred Honey

BBC Radio Four schedulers have foolishly abandoned the ninety minute feature length film frame for radio drama, but the form is maintained with force and elegance by BBC Radio Three. The contemporary novelist Sarah Hall, ‘one of the most original and exciting voices in contemporary British fiction’ according to the BBC publicity machine, sustains this hype with a magnificent dramatisation of her third 2007 novel The Carhullan Army.