Depth Charge

An ancient submariner finds himself underwater.
For this old sailor the sea is a lot rougher on dry land.

The pain of estrangement from his only son & the desire to please his wife with a new freezer, that is beyond the budget, sets the drama in motion.
A young shark smells emotional blood and swims in to take advantage.
David Calder is quite convincing and sympathetic as the old sailor in Fiona Mackie's well crafted, satisfying, and distressingly timely drama.

It serves as a individual case study of the debt crisis that is currently of global significance.

Depth Charge The Afternoon Play BBC Radio 4 is only available until Aug. 6, 2010.

Will Earstory ever get around to reviewing anything other than BBC plays?

Hive Mind

Hive Mind By Simon Bovey is an outstanding radio play. Simon Bovey, within the package of near future speculative fiction, packs a lot of present day issues into the 45 minute BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play slot. His jumping off point is the recent questions of the stability of the global bee populations. He, in a quick sentence, sets up a situation in 2019 where the bees are no more. He quickly reports the causes of this, which are the ones that are today generally being assumed, and charges forward into the gloomy aftermath with food shortages and farmers struggling to pollenate by other means including human workers going from plant to plant.

Enter the big corporation with a new product, computer controlled robotic bees.

Simon Bovey wisely sets all this within one small farm, where we get to meet and care about the human factor in what otherwise could have been treated as a big impersonal story. This is exactly the way to create a political, eco justice, drama that the average listener is likely to become engaged in and Bovey accomplishes a masterful turn in this one.
Here we have, big corporate agriculture issues (think Monsanto), automation, labor relations, ecology, the struggles of a small business and they are all fitted neatly into the 45 minute time slot without feeling rushed or glossed over, but presented in a very entertaining dramatic package.

Sadly only available for listening until Monday July 26, 2010, so get to Hive Mind while you can.

The Reluctant Millionaire

One of the many good things about radio drama is that, in comparison to more expensive sound and vision media, the turn around time from conception to completion can be rather short. For the past year or two BBC's Radio 4 The Afternoon Play slot has had a few plays set in and dealing with the current depression. It is that TV and movies get money to produce from wealth and therefore does not want to face the current crisis other than making fun of the trashy poor, or that they have projects still involved in years of development?
The production money for Radio 4 drama content comes from the BBC which is not chained to corporate dreams of profit or from the wealthy with excess cash that they might not wish to be used to provide us with a look at the dark side of the status quo.

The Reluctant Millionaire by Wendy Oberman is one of these post depression dramas. Here we visit a hairdresser whose business is down and debt unmanageable. Finding a lost winning lottery ticket brings a moral dilemma to the hairdresser and her war vet husband. Wounded war veterans might be another topic corporate media might be reluctant to look into, especially when we continue the ask soldiers to go over there in endless costly wars. This play does not preach. It's just a little story about normal people struggling to get by.

The Understanding

This Radio 4 Afternoon Play by P. G. Morgan is very nicely done. It is presented as part of ". . .a new series of Radio 4's Inside The Ethics Committee. . ." which begins this week.

Here we have issues of medical intervention, religious restrictions on such, the understanding between the patient and doctor, before and during the procedures, and the united front of belief between a husband and wife. All of it is expertly handled with post procedural interviews and flashbacks to the life and death hospital moments. This is a complex but lucid, gripping drama of emotions, faith, ethics and beliefs.

The questions of medical ethics are only going to be more confusing as powerful and costly methods continue to be discovered. We may find more and more of us reaching a point when we have to decide when we believe enough is enough. Or is that going to be just when whatever health insurance, state or private, will refuse to play the enormous bills for more?
This play deals with complications of childbirth and a religious faith that does not include blood transfusion.

Is playwright P. G. Morgan a man or woman?

Of Mice And Men

Up this week form BBC Radio 4 Classic Serial is an hour long adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel Of Mice And Men. Having viewed a couple movie adaptations of this and now listened to the radio play, I came away wondering what more there is in the original novel. I find my self excited to consume the latest adaptation, but afterwards feeling a little disappointed in how stark and melodramatic the story is. There must be something more n the novel.

Don't get me wrong, this version written by Donna Franceschild is just fine, but if you know the story you kind of know the story. And the story is a dark one bathed in California 1930s migrant worker sunlight. Listening to this version, I found myself wondering what to make of the plot, what is the point of the story. Is it a monster story? (Pre-monster Lon Chaney Jr. played him in the excellent 1939 Hal Roach production.) It is a story of innocent , dumb sensuality, and lust in the form of the mostly gentle Lennie, who is lethal to none but the soft things he loves to touch. It is true that you only hurt the one you love?

Of Mice and Men is available to stream through March 19, 2010. It's a good little production, especially suited to those who have not heard the story before.

Buffalo Bill and Little Matty Dyer

Buffalo Bill and Little Matty Dyer by Peter Spafford is a period piece that feels like it has been a bit injected with the a type of political consciousness from several decades later. I say "feels" because I have no knowledge of what a 14 year old boy in Leeds would understand about anything. That said it remains an engaging play about a Buffalo Bill Wild West Show tour of England in 1903. Buffalo Bill Wild West Show was an entertainment that toured the US and Europe from 1883 and for roughly the next 39 years.

Peter Spafford presents a backstage story with minor players becoming involved with the some of the locals in Leeds. There is the fact of the continuous injustice to the American Indians, some of whom are players in the show, and continue to have trouble within the troop and with local discrimination. I have no idea if in reality the traveling players would be so involved with the locals, as Little Matty Dyer is in the play, but the notion does afford an opportunity for an entertaining and slightly pleasantly didactic play.

Buffalo Bill and Little Matty Dyer is well produced and performed, setting the mood of time and place, Definitely worth a listen, but probably off the BBC iPlayer Listen Again by the time you read this.