The last series of The Time Being took us to London’s Bankside for booze and stalking, to rural Surrey where a woman gave birth to a llama, and to a dog track in Wales. The next two programmes, starting on Friday, are listed as a new series, but they really belong with the previous three radio debuts.
Closer
So where next? Rome, as it happens. ‘Closer’, a stylish tale by C.D. Rose, is set in 1977, during the anni di piombo (‘Years Of Lead’). This is the time of terrorist groups such as Lotta Continua, Prima Linea and – probably best known – Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), who would later kidnap and murder former prime minister Aldo Moro. What is an ordinary young woman doing waiting outside the home of a prominent lawyer? You’ll have to listen to find out. Bryony Hannah’s reading – a trans-European rail journey away from Call The Midwife – isexpertly judged, and gives away nothing until it needs to.
Spells For Love
The second tale takes us to the north of England and goes out the following Friday (31 January). ‘Spells For Love’ is a mother and daughter story of love, loss and white magic by Melissa Lee-Houghton. (And more, but again, you’ll have to listen.) Some of you may – and more of you should – be familiar with Melissa’s poetry, and her recent collection, Beautiful Girls, has just been recommended by The Poetry Book Society. ‘Spells For Love’ is an unsettling tale in which love, like fire, needs to be handled with extreme care. Ruth Gemmell inhabits the story completely in her reading, and characterises both Sybil (mother) and Lucia (daughter) with great tenderness.
Coming Soon From Geezerinhat …
It’s a busy time, with programmes featuring the work of Alison Moore, Olga Grushin, Lynne Truss, Adam Marek and Alison MacLeod all hitting the airwaves in March. I hope to write about some or indeed all of them in due course. And at long last a more ‘authored’ geezer-piece exists, albeit in note form. Until then, thanks for reading, and happy listening.
The other week, in Nuremburg, I was drifting about the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, as you do. I wasn’t at all thinking about work (✓good) until the sight of something in a glass case brought me up short. Inside was a small anatomical figure, about six inches long: a pregnant woman, carved in ivory, with a detachable abdomen to reveal the foetus and inner workings. Next to it – since in the midst of life we are in death – was a coffin-shaped carrying box. It didn’t take much of a leap to land back in a world from which I’d only recently escaped – 17th century Florence and the work of Sicilian sculptor Gaetano Zummo (1656 – 1701), the central character in Rupert Thomson’s novel, Secrecy.
Compared to the ivory-turner of the Nuremburg piece – Stephan Zick (1639 – 1715) – Zummo thought that little bit bigger. He worked in wax, his figures were sometimes life-size, and he aspired not only to anatomical precision but to artistic composition, too. Whoever commissioned Zick did so, presumably, with education in mind. In Secrecy, Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany, pays Zummo to make a wax figure – life-size and very secret – that is both more and less than educational.
Florence at this time is in the grip of moral repression. Everyone nurses potentially damaging secrets. Rumours can be just as dangerous, and the Medici court is a seriously bad place in which to be exposed. Zummo has travelled through Italy over the years to keep one step ahead of his own past. And Faustina, an apothecary’s daughter and Zummo’s mysterious lover, carries the most dangerous secret of all. In the background, waiting for Zummo to slip up, is Stufa, a deeply sinister Dominican monk. The drama is played out in a finely recreated Florence of beauty and menace where, if you take the backstreets, you’ll never be more that six feet from a stiletto.
Secrecy came out in March to considerable and deserved applause (click here for the Guardian’s review) and I was a little surprised not to see it on the Man Booker long list. The radio version starts 26 August at 10.45 pm on Radio 4.
With so many layers of concealment and hidden meanings to tackle, this was without doubt the trickiest book I’ve attempted to abridge, so I was glad to have producer Ros Ward’s forensic eye going over the scripts. The story is told by Zummo as if recounted to Marguerite-Louise d’Orléans, long-estranged wife of the Grand Duke, with prologue and epilogue voiced by Marguerite-Louise herself. Owen Teale does a fine job not only to drive the narrative and characterise the assorted cast, but to give Zummo himself passion and humanity, without which, in our much-shortened version, he might seem just a tad creepy. If I had to pick a favourite episode, it would be the last, in which Owen brings Zummo’s tale to its dramatic end, before Greta Scacchi, superb as Marguerite-Louise, gives the story a last, beautiful twist.
Listen to and enjoy this tale of love, concealment, art and just a little murder. And then, if you haven’t already, please read the book.
I first saw Katy Darby at the Betsey Trotwood pub, helping launch of the Overheard story collection early in the year. In between filming the event, she found time to read a story of her own – in plausible Peckham accent and dialect – called ‘The Door In The Wall’. Inspiration and profound disappointment collide in this tale, set in a classroom and in a secretish passage beneath. It’s a London story, and equally, Katy’s brace of historical tales for Radio 4, the first of which on Sunday at 7.45 pm, are both as London as yellow clay.
Some of you will know Katy as the driving force behind the monthly live reading event Liars’ League. Or as the author of The Unpierced Heart (originally published as The Whores’ Asylum) which came out last year. But Cries Of Londonis her radio debut.
The first story, ‘The Tyburn Jig’, is set in 1774, and follows a young groom Fred’s journey from Newgate Prison to his terminal destination at the gallows, as seen through the eyes of Sarah, his soon-to-be widow. Beyond that, I shan’t give anything away. Reader Hattie Morahan doesn’t give too much away, either, until the time is right, keeping the narrative ‘above the surface’ while betrayal, sex and murder flow underground like the River Fleet.
Matthew Hathersedge, the character in the second tale, aspires to something more elevated than Sarah. ‘On Apollonian Shores’ has a Regency flavour. Hathersedge – not-very-good poet and even worse suicide – is disappointed by life. He longs for the critical acclaim – and doubtless the house – once accorded to “that Cockney upstart Keats” but finds neither forthcoming. Will fate take a hand? You’ll have to listen as David Bamber steers you through the mess of Hathersedge’s life.
Production is always a ‘horse for courses’ affair, and for Cries Of London we’ve gone for a traditional ‘unplugged’ approach. Nothing between the listener and Katy’s energetic and witty storytelling and Hattie and David’s classy interpretations. Although the stories are introduced with the help of a familiar tune from the church bells of St Clement Danes …
And you can read Katy’s much livelier account of the process here.
One Friday, in October 2006, I was skimming the music pages of The Guardian. I was already ‘old’ by then and had never been cool, so it felt like a form of tourism. But then I came across a column entitled ‘Hail, Hail, Rock and Roll!”. It was a piece about a song, well-written. Better still, the song in question was old, wonderful and ever-so-slightly odd. It celebrated youth and freedom on a solo night drive in “Massachusetts when it’s late at night,” on a long and, on the face of it, unglamorous ring road: Route 128. The song was ‘Roadrunner’ by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, and the columnist was Laura Barton.
The next year, Laura followed this up with a personal account of her pilgrimage to Route 128. And now, appropriately, we have the radio version, Roadrunner, going out on Radio 4 this Sunday at 7.45 p.m.
Better you should read Laura’s articles than have me paraphrase them here (click on the links above). Equally, I don’t want to give away too much about the radio story because I hope you’ll listen. All I’ll say is that it gives voice to the Road, Route 128, itself: “I was built to inspire a song. A love song for a road, for a car, for music and the modern world. A song about about going faster miles an hour. With the radio on.”
Seven Types Of Roadrunner
However, there is nothing to stop you listening to the song immediately. There are a number of versions of ‘Roadrunner’, many of them by Jonathan Richman himself. Here are just seven.
The first, by the original Modern Lovers lineup, was recorded in 1972 and produced by John Cale of the Velvet Underground, but wasn’t released until four years later. It’s not my favourite, but it rocks hard and there’s a keyboard solo by (I’m guessing) Jerry Harrison, later of Talking Heads. This is probably the most accessible version for someone new to the song.
The stripped down ‘Roadrunner (Once)’ by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers was a UK hit in the summer of 1977. I prefer it, partly because it allows more of Richman’s quirkiness to come through but mostly because it allows me some nostalgia. Fourteen and introverted, I would sit at the top of the house of an evening “with the radio on, for company.” Radio Luxembourg (208) on a small tranny, to be precise. Now and then, Donna Summer feeling love, or Fleetwood Mac dreaming or The Brotherhood of Man (ahem) doing whatever with Angelo would be interrupted by something more interesting. The Stranglers. The Sex Pistols. And also this guy playing a song – mostly on two chords – about going faster miles an hour. He sang quietly about how exciting it was at night with the pine trees in the dark and how cold it was. The woo and whee of imperfect MW reception filled the gaps in the sound and seemed to punctuate the phrases with question marks.
‘Roadrunner’ is very easy to play and very difficult to capture. To my mind, no cover has managed it. The Sex Pistols’ version is a non-starter, mostly because Sid Vicious doesn’t know the words, but it does convey the simple hypnotic pleasure of bashing out the same chords over and over again. Joan Jett’s is too processed for my taste and sounds like PA music at a gig before the support band come on. Greg Kihn finds some of the “spirit of old 1956” but little of the song’s strangeness. From that point of view, Yo La Tengo’s version may be closest in spirit to the original.
You’re better off staying with Jonathan Richman. Laura writes at length about ‘Roadrunner (Thrice)’. And it’s a joy. Because of its length (over eight minutes) the drive turns into an epic journey. There is a sense of space, of time passing, and the extended soliloquy on being alone makes you wonder if there’s just a hint of whistling in the dark beneath the apparent joie de vivre. History doesn’t relate whether William Empson had views on ‘Roadrunner’ – and I apologise for using the ‘Seven Types’ so frivolously – but I think he might have found some ambiguities here.
“We’re gonna drive them home, you guys.”
And so back to the Road. It’s a lot to expect of an actor to characterise 58 miles of tarmac, but John Schwab‘s reading is assured and lived-in, and captures both the spirit and the rhythms of Laura’s writing. If Route 128 could really speak, it would sound like John.
“Often, Steven sat in the middle of the children, looking out on the blue of the rippling, writhing ocean and the peninsula of palm trees that stretched into it a few miles down. He felt the beat of his own heart in his chest and it seemed to play into the rhythm of the water in front of him. That heartbeat, and the faint electrical current that fuzzed steadily beneath his eyes, making him slightly queasy; that was the soundtrack of Mexico for him.”
This passage is taken from ‘Latido One’, the first in a set of three stories by writer and artist Louise Stern, written specially for Radio 4. For me, it encapsulates what the series is about. Latido (Spanish for heartbeat) goes out on consecutive Fridays at 3.45 pm – and available on iPlayer thereafter – starting on Friday, 12 July.*
I first worked with Louise last year when she contributed ‘The Electric Box’ – a brooding piece in which tensions surface at a Fourth of July family barbecue – for our series Where Were You … She’d been on the air before, a few stories from her first collection Chattering went out in 2010, but this was her first bespoke work for radio. It was only afterwards that we felt this wasn’t entirely mainstream. Why? Louise is a fine writer, period: but she happens to be deaf from birth.
We wanted to do more, and met up several times last summer and autumn. At this stage, we hadn’t so much established a concept or a writer’s brief as come up with areas of exploration. Namely, the internalised ‘soundtrack’ of the profoundly deaf, and Louise’s personal passion for Mexico.
This was the easy bit, of course. Louise then wintered in Mexico and got on with the hard bit of conceiving and writing the thing. The result is Latido. All three stories are set in a Mexican village and each one features a deaf central character. The heartbeat leitmotif reprises in all three tales. And none of it gets in the way of some very good storytelling. In ‘Latido One’, a deaf foreigner gets on the wrong side of the one man in the village who will not accept him. ‘Two’ takes us onto the ocean with a deaf member of a fishing crew. ‘Three’ starts out as a ‘quiet’ observational, atmospheric piece, only to turn into a story of sexual betrayal and revenge.
As a writer, Louise has a natural sensuality, an ability to zoom in on her subjects like a child in the garden with a magnifying glass and, above all, a sense of ‘otherness’ that we were keen to replicate in the recording studio. Louise Brealey (known to some of you as ‘Molly’ in Sherlock) reads all three stories and gives us this, I think. Sadly, Louise (Stern) won’t hear the stories, but she did come to the recording with her long-time interpreter Oliver Pouliot and gave us many useful steers during the day.
Sound and silence go hand in hand, of course, and we had one or two ideas for post-production. There are moments of soundscape throughout the series – in ‘One’ Louise has effectively written one in the opening pages – and the noises come from a variety of sources. There’s music by Chavela Vargas and J.J. Cale; effects from sound-man Jon Calver’s library and some wild-track recorded in ‘Louise’s village’ in Mexico by Sophie Pierozzi. And then there’s ‘the heartbeat’ – occurring at varying speeds under moments of particular excitement or stress in the characters – that Jon has ‘felt’ like a jazz virtuoso.
Cum On Feel The Noize
Ultimately, all radio programmes have to work on a variety of devices, and I hope you enjoy Latido whether you listen on DAB, mobile, TV, vintage portable Roberts on long wave or a 1940s wireless where the Home Service is west of Hilversum on the dial. But, if you happen to be able to listen through big speakers, crank it up loud and put your hand against one. Mostly, you’ll feel the lovely vibrations of Louise Brealey’s voice, but keep it there for long enough and, at certain times, you’ll feel the latido, the heartbeat, too.
* A transcript of each programme will be published on the Radio 4 website directly after broadcast.
The sixth season of The Time Being, the showcase for ‘new voices’, started on Radio 4 last Sunday evening (19 May). The three stories go out on consecutive Sundays and are available on iPlayer for a week thereafter.
It’s the end of a process that began with 220-plus stories that needed to be read. And to reduce them to three posed a number of challenges. We used very good sources to amplify the call for submissions so the general standard was quite high. This was a good thing, but it meant no shortcuts were available. True, a a few stories were clearly unusable – if only because the sender had ignored our guidelines and criteria – but leaving those aside, none were poor enough to discard after the first paragraph. Every tale deserved a fair hearing.
Then there is the need to maintain the reader’s morale. One of the most interesting things about finding material for each series is to see what themes are preoccupying writers at a given time. Trouble is, if those preoccupations are dark, and you’ve read six or seven tales of similar bleakness in a row, however well told, it can get you down a little. If you sent a story for the series and you’re reading this, let me stress that I’m not having a go at you, as you didn’t write with this particular scenario in mind. It’s just an occupational hazard of the job – my problem, not yours.
Voice is all
Because we issue a set of guidelines and criteria for the submissions, it makes The Time Being sound like a ‘competition’ or prize like the V.S. Pritchett, or Bridport, or Mrs. Joyful (For Rafia Work – of blessed memory.) It isn’t. Ultimately we choose stories that we particularly like and think will work well on air. It so happens that all three stories we’ve recorded this time are first person narratives, but that’s accident, not design. Dramatic monologues can work (but be careful, they are tricky to pull off successfully), so can ‘conventional’ third person omniscience. In the end, what we look for most is voice: the sense that this story, whatever its rough edges, could only be written by this particular writer, and no one else.
Having said that, there aren’t many rough edges on what I think is a very accomplished set. No spoilers – because I’d rather you listen – but Marathon, by Claire Powell, tells the story of an alcohol-driven extra-marital affair (from the mistress’s point of view) that goes very, very sour when her lover decides to get fit. Llama Sutra, by Melanie Whipman, is even stranger than the title suggests, and even this preview clip – Love In The Time Of Llamas – doesn’t give away quite how strange it is. Rebecca F. John’s The Dog Track tells the story of an unusual and lonely young woman who finds herself alone at the greyhound races, weighing up a matter of life and death. As chance would have it, I was at the dogs at Wimbledon Stadium the day after we recorded the story. We went as a family and enjoyed it hugely, and there were a lot of groups and ‘birthday party’ gatherings there having fun, too. But it did strike me as a very lonely place to be by yourself.
New voices for new voices
I like ‘studio day’: so often it seems more like play than work. It helps that I’m part of a very good and lovely team. And, because each reader brings something with them you might not expect, it’s a collaborative effort. You never end up with a mere ‘aural reproduction’ of the words on the page. And to add to the three writers making their radio debuts, two of the readers were letting their voices loose for the first time on Radio 4. Camilla Marie Beeput, who brings such surprise and warmth to Llama Sutra, is a relative newcomer, for the moment – though not for very much longer – best known for doing the crossword with Yoda in the Vodaphone ad. (Sorry, Camilla!) More surprisingly – for such a good and established screen actress – Marathon is Lorraine Pilkington’s first Radio 4 appearance. If you listen to the story, and hear her beautifully calibrated rendering of the ‘other woman’, who goes from sexy to sad to ever-so-slightly sinister in the space of thirteen minutes, you can only ask: why haven’t you done this before? Similarly, if you listen to Rakie Ayola inhabit a very complex character so completely in The Dog Track, I defy you not to want to hear her more often.
Geezer voices, ever singing …
Speaking of voices, I’m aware that my most recent posts have been driven by ‘events’, and that my own voice, or my blog voice anyway – never strong – has lately been little more than a bat squeak. For the few select fans of more random and pointless geezerposts – I hope to remedy this as soon as headspace permits.
Disclaimer: the food in ‘The Middlesteins’ is often better than this.
And much else besides.
So, we have two siblings, Benny and Robin, who grew up in the Chicago suburbs. Benny is married to Rachelle, who is the sort of daughter-in-law many Jewish families would love to have. They have twins, Josh and Emily, preparing for their b’nai mitzvah. Benny tries to be a good husband and father, a still point in a turning world – though he needs a joint after work to help him. His sister Robin has a galactico-sized talent for anger and unhappiness and she likes a glass of wine, or several. In the past, Benny has worried about Robin. But not any more. He has bigger worries now: his father Richard, and in particular, his mother, Edie.
Edie was a lawyer for thirty-five years. Now, she’s a big woman with a big personality and not enough to do. And the trouble is, she’s getting bigger. She weighs in at near on 350 pounds. She’s about to have a stent put in one leg to match the stent put in the other leg six months ago. She has diabetes. There are dark murmurings at the hospital about bypass surgery.
Edie, it seems, is eating herself to death. And after nearly forty years of marriage, Richard has walked out on her.
Who are these guys? They are The Middlesteins, now published in the UK and coming to BBC Radio 4 next week (click here for the programme link). I won’t say much more so as to keep the surprise – this astute review from The Independent gives more background, if you want it – but it’s not giving away too much to say that this wonderful novel is built around food. Food is everywhere, from Edie’s reckless and continual pit-stops in burger bars to the Chinese restaurant where she finds friendship, love and a limitless menu. The fate of the family is discussed over meals at home or in restaurants. Robin attends a seder at her boyfriend’s parents house and leaves with an (unwanted) tupperware container of leftover brisket. The b’nai mitzvah features that ultimate status symbol, a chocolate fountain. As Edie’s parents conclude in the opening chapter: “Food was made of love, and love was made of food.” Edie’s tragedy is that she takes refuge in this thought and runs with it way, way too far.
Jami Attenberg, by Michael Sharkey
This is Jami Attenberg‘s fourth book and her first to be published in the UK, following two previous novels – The Kept Man and The Melting Season – and a collection of stories, Instant Love. Until now, she was little-known over here, but I suspect this has changed forever.
In a previous post (Reader’s Block), I said I was lucky enough so far to have only worked on books that I loved. This applies with additional sweet’n’sour to The Middlesteins. It’s a sad and bitter book in some ways, but underscored with heart, and it’s very, very funny. While some might describe them as dysfunctional, for me the Middlesteins are just flawed, messy and sometimes confused like the rest of us. And even though my job is finished, I find myself still worrying about them.
For the adaptation we had to lose, unfortunately, most of the chapters that deal with Edie’s back story. And one of the challenges in paring down the text was the number of long sentences with parenthetical ‘asides’. These can be an abridger’s friend – often they can be cut without losing too much that’s important in an episode. But not in this case. We’d have lost too much of the book’s flavour, those moments of ‘more-thoughts-than-I can-get-out-of-my-head-at-once’ that spit and crackle like a steak dropped into hot oil. But having decided to keep them, this posed a fresh challenge in the studio. If you read them too slowly the listener will lose track of the thread. They have to taken quickly, so that it sounds as if they burst out of your head that very moment. But reader Tracy-Ann Oberman and producer Karen Rose were more than up for it. And not only do they keep the narrative pulsing, Tracy-Ann’s characterisations (and there are a lot of them) are a delight.
I hope you enjoy our ‘low-calorie’ radio version (told in 20,000 of the book’s 67,000 words) but equally I hope you will go on to read The Middlesteins in it’s full, unexpurgated, sodium-and-sauce-drenched glory.
Until next time, eat and feed each other with love, but please do so (more or less) responsibly …
And if you listened, I hope you fell in love with Annika too. Should you like to hear an earlier Nick & Nicola Walker collaboration, here’s the link to the radio play Lifecoach, as promised: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00s2w24.
She doesn’t – as far as we know – have a sartorial trademark like leather trousers or a Faroe jumper. But she’s a fisherman’s daughter, with a passion for driving motor boats at high speed, so maybe state-of-the-art Scandinavian waterproofs figure somewhere. And in moments of high stress, when Sarah Lund might jump into her car without explanation, when Saga Norén might make a factually correct and emotionally clueless remark, Annika Strandhed of the Oslo murder squad is more likely to crack a joke. Trouble is, her colleagues seldom think she’s funny …
But instead of me telling the whole thing, badly, far better to listen to Annika Stranded (click here for BBC link) on Radio 4, 7.45 pm for the next three Sundays.
For some in the UK the Scandinavian crime ‘bubble’ has already burst – ‘it isn’t great and actually it’s just boring’ – but this isn’t a view I share. For one thing, I don’t think it’s a bubble. Granted, fewer lucky journalists are likely to be dispatched to Copenhagen to have coffee with the likes of Sofie Gråbøl in future, but that’s because Scandinavian crime drama has settled down to take its murky place in our everyday viewing culture, just as American crime has for decades. And for another thing, I’m a fan, a junkie even. No, I haven’t read much (although I did enjoy Henning Mankell’s The Dogs Of Riga years ago) but telly’s another matter. Dysfunctional detectives? Beautiful but bleak coastal landscapes? Murky warehouses? Wood-panelled interiors? Subtitles? Bring them on …
So when Annika-writer Nick Walker suggested his singular take on the genre, he was pushing at an open door.
The Two Walkers
They’re not related, they’re not one and the same person, but I suspect they are symbiotic in some way. The first thing to know about Nick Walker is that more people should know about Nick Walker. He has written two novels – Blackbox and Helloland – but most of his energy is directed towards radio and theatre work. Because of this, I can’t point you towards his back-catalogue in the same way as with a novelist, and can only hope you’ve caught up with some of his wonderful works on BBC Radio in recent years. To name but a few: the recent play Stormchasers (broadcast over Christmas), the poignant and inventive Messages To A Submariner, and the First King Of Mars stories (voiced first by Peter Capaldi and later, by Dave Lamb.)
Fans of Spooks, and lately, Last Tango In Halifax, will need no introduction to Nicola Walker. TV casting has tended to put her in victim or generally-put-upon roles – and since Nicola is good in all she does it’s a safe bet – but radio has so far provided more scope to show how warm, versatile and funny she is. In Annika Stranded she is all these things, and inhabits the character so completely that it would be easy to believe she’d written the stories herself.
As luck would have it, a previous ‘Nick-ola Walker’ production, Lifecoach, is repeating on Radio 4 on 7 February. I’ll post the link when it becomes available.
Noises On
The classic approach to a radio story is ‘less-is-more’: a reader, a story and at most a little ‘top and tail’ music, putting as little as possible between story and listener. And this still works best with most stories. But Annika Stranded is effectively a series of mini-dramas – performed as such – so it needed something more. Nicola was recorded in studio – neither time nor budget permitted going to Norway – but Nick collected some very good wild-track when he went to Oslo for research. So most of what you hear in the background is authentic Oslo noise. And there’s music from Swedish duo First Aid Kit and some haunting cello from Icelandic musician Hildur Guðnadóttir, too.
This is an unashamedly biased piece. I hope that if you listen to Annika Stranded you enjoy it as much as I do. And as always, thanks for reading.
Well OK, Marvin Gaye wasn’t there of course, but it was good fun all the same.
Last night, I went to the launch of OVERHEARD: stories to read aloud at The Betsey Trotwood in Clerkenwell. It’s an impressive collection, edited by Jonathan Taylor – also our MC for the evening – with 38 contributors (if I’ve counted right) ranging from the likes of Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie to expert ‘flashistas’ like Tania Hershman to the oral storyteller Katherine Rogers, and with any number of good and different voices in between. OVERHEARD is available and on general sale courtesy of those resurgent, independent and wonderfully human publishers Salt.
About half the authors were there in person to read extracts from their stories (or the whole thing, if they were very short.) It would be unfair to single out anyone as such, but I would like to mention two names I’d not heard of until last night: Alexandros Plasatis – whose hilarious, 18-certificate tale Confessions of a Great Lover brought the house down – and Emma J Lannie’s quieter but no less arresting ‘short short’ One Two.
On the tube home I read Jonathan’s introduction. Better for you to buy the book and read it than for me to paraphrase here, but it raised some thoughtful and interesting points about the traditions of oral storytelling and distinctions between public ‘performance’ and stories read aloud intimately at home. This picked up on something I’d been thinking about during the evening. In the first half, I sat at the front, close to the reader and the mic, and was aware of concentrating on the performance. But in the second I was at the back – oddly it seemed more as if I was listening ‘one on one’.
Salt don’t do barmaids, but if they did … (With apologies and love to Alison MacLeod (left) and Jen Hamilton-Emery)
Stories on the radio – or good ones, anyway – have a bit of both experiences. Actors read them, so even with the lightest directorial touch performance is built in to some extent, but there’s the one-on-one intimacy too, since what we’re aiming for is a story for about 400,000 single listeners.
Readings aside, the craic was good, too. It’s always nice to catch up with the likes of Jen Hamilton-Emery (Salt), Tania H and Vanessa Gebbie but great also to meet some ‘onliners’ in the flesh for the first time like Alison MacLeod, Elizabeth Baines and Katy Darby. And the barman downstairs gave me a brief, knowledgeable and passionate tutorial on single malts …
Next week’s post will have a Scandinavian flavour – big time. But until then, thanks for reading.
So where next? Rome, as it happens. ‘Closer’, a stylish tale by C.D. Rose, is set in 1977, during the anni di piombo (‘Years Of Lead’). This is the time of terrorist groups such as Lotta Continua, Prima Linea and – probably best known – Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), who would later kidnap and murder former prime minister Aldo Moro. What is an ordinary young woman doing waiting outside the home of a prominent lawyer? You’ll have to listen to find out. Bryony Hannah’s reading – a trans-European rail journey away from Call The Midwife – is expertly judged, and gives away nothing until it needs to.
The second tale takes us to the north of England and goes out the following Friday (31 January). ‘Spells For Love’ is a mother and daughter story of love, loss and white magic by Melissa Lee-Houghton. (And more, but again, you’ll have to listen.) Some of you may – and more of you should – be familiar with Melissa’s poetry, and her recent collection, Beautiful Girls, has just been recommended by The Poetry Book Society. ‘Spells For Love’ is an unsettling tale in which love, like fire, needs to be handled with extreme care. Ruth Gemmell inhabits the story completely in her reading, and characterises both Sybil (mother) and Lucia (daughter) with great tenderness.
