Beyond the Roundels

So, back in autumn, I found the collection of BBC Radio's Saturday Night Theatre someone had put on the Internet Archive (also originally here with often slightly better audio at OTTR), ranging in date from the 1950s to the 1990s and with the help of the BBC Genome to identify things, downloaded all the Martin Jarvis ones, all the David Collings ones and a couple of bonus plays while I was at it. Ever since I've been slowly listening to them, although as I did them chronologically, and Mr Collings didn't get going on radio till the 80s, it's been mostly Mr Jarvis.

I've been wanting to talk about these because a lot of them were really easy and enjoyable intros to interesting or well known mid-century novelists and playwrights that I had never read/seen and probably never would have any other way, and that was just really nice. I ended up writing these and being all "I enjoyed this!" Which is frustrating, because that doesn't generate conversation, but I do want to talk audio plays and I did enjoy most of them a lot.

Martin Jarvis was mainly a lot of young officers who were either nice or messed up in some way. I feel like they were all called Peter or Paul or Michael, but I'm not sure that's true.


1. Journey's End (1970) - adaptation of Sheriff's play, with Martin Jarvis as Stanhope. I was very excited for this one, as I wanted to familiarise myself with the play because James Maxwell played Osborne (apprently very well) on stage in the early 70s (with Peter Egan as Stanhope), and this made for a very accessible way for me to finally do it. It's set in WWI and it's very good. It's had a more recent film adaptation, so people probably know of it anyway. (Richard Hurndall was also in it, because obv Richard Hurndall is just obligatory at this point. I was not at all surprised to hear him. I'm only surprised he didn't turn up again.)


2. A Question of Fact (1970) - an original radio play, set in the 1950s, where Martin Jarvis a teacher at a boys' public school, who discovers shortly before his marriage that he's adopted and is the son of a murderer and starts worrying about bad blood and whether he should have married his wife (whose parents don't approve of him anyway) and if he should still be teaching etc etc. The sound on this one wasn't that great (although ok!) and I was worried about where it was going, but once his birth mother turned up, it all went to places I didn't expect and had a rather good ending, and I enjoyed it. I'd have enjoyed it more if I'd known that was where it was going and not had to worry what the 1970s-written, 1950s-set thing was going to give me.


3. The Wind Cannot Read (1971) - adaptation of Richard Mason's novel. This one was really interesting! I hadn't heard of the author before and had to go and look him up, because the story was actually pretty unusual. It turns out the book is still in print and there was also a film version and that he wrote a few other novels - I might see if I can read some one day.

It was set in WWII in the far east. Martin Jarvis is an injured soldier sent to learn Japanese for intelligence work, who falls in love with the teacher, a Japanese woman who is helping the Allies, and who suffers a lot of prejudice and suspicion directed at her. It's a full on weepy, so you can guess what happens, but it immediately felt unusual for the era and sympathetic enough to catch my interest, as I said.


Not (sadly) 4. The Twelve Maidens (1971, 6 pt occult drama serial) - this one was not a SNT but it caught my attention going through the MJ Genome results, because I do like a bit of dodgy 1970s village of evil type stories. It may exist (or at least partially; an episode or something was returned to the BBC Archives relatively recently), but whatever the case, it is not available to me on the internet. It was also adapted shortly after in teh 1970s for German radio (ironically this DOES still exist and IS on the internet archive for download, so if you speak German, it's yours), but the writer turned it into a novel as well, and I got hold of it! It did get a bit preachy (the author was a founder member of the UK Wiccan religion and keen to explain it all in his novel), but most of it was so dialogue heavy, those parts had to be straight out of the radio play and it gave a really good idea of the plot and characters and how the audio aspect would have been handled - its origins were so clear that someone else who reviewed online basically said "this would make a great radio play." It also immediately struck me as possibly being one of the sources that fed into Chris Boucher's Image of the Fendahl - the general tone, and opening with the scientists, and in particular Martin Jarvis's character Peter being a similar combination of sceptic-despite-overwhelming evidence-BUT-still-helpful to the end as Colby that I've not seen anywhere else (although of course, maybe the ur-Peter-Colby figure comes from some more famous example of the genre, because, being a horror-wimp, I haven't even managed Quatermass yet so what do I know?)

I loved that Peter was basically bewitched twice, witnessed several performances of magic and probably killed the baddies by magic and remained entirely sceptical. Even the security guy was into white magic before the end, but not Peter. EVeryone else was just: Peter is an idiot, but he's our idiot, and you can't keep casting spells on him.

This is the ending, so you can see how delighted I would be to listen to this one if I could. I would probably write fic, too:

( Cut for my pics of the last 3 pages for the delectation of my readlist )

Plus, I want to know if all the nudity is in the actual serial or was just part of the extra sexy bits added to the book. (I'm just amused at radio nudity. The easiest kind of nudity for actors to play! No need for any fuss or worry or catching chills in a draughty studio! lol)


4. Mutiny on the Bounty (1973) - adaptation of the famous novel, fictional version of historical events, I don't need to tell the story. Martin Jarvis was Fletcher Christian. He did some mutinying and disappeared off with his ship. I enjoyed it. The sound was a bit questionable.


5. & 6. The Prisoner of Zenda & Rupert of Hentzau (1973) - adaptations of the novels with Julian Glover as Rudolf (both), Hannah Gordon as Flavia, Nigel Stock as Colonel Sapt and Martin Jarvis as Rupert of Hentzau. This was as much fun as I'd hoped. I did once read or try to read Zenda and I was not keen on it at the time. (I was a teenager, I was very unimpressed with the lack of stuff for the women to do and I couldn't be bothered. I think I ended up skimming through it and rolling my eyes.) This was a great way to actually find out the story without having to attempt any more reading of the series (other than watching The Androids of Tara, of course! XD) Obviously, if your no. 1 priority is sword fights, you can only listen to these, which I suppose must be a drawback (although you can amuse yourself imagining probably true images of Julian Glover and Martin Jarvis doing their own sound effects with cutlery or similar.) Anyway, it was good and I enjoyed it much more than trying to read the book back in the day. Rupert is a terrible villain, though; he keeps just running off and ruining his and other people's evil plots because he gets fed up and shoots the wrong people.


7. Strode Venturer (1974) - adaptation of a Hammond Innes novel. This one I didn't enjoy so much, but tbf, that was probably because the audio quality was poor AND it featured a lot of storms, helicopters and modern ships, so I spent most of it trying to work out what was going on. But John Shrapnel was looking for Martin Jarvis, which was a lot of effort because Martin Jarvis kept going off to different hard to find islands in the far east, so Martin Jarvis was lucky John Shrapnel was patient enough to do it. Eventually John Shrapnel had enough of looking for Martin Jarvis and went back and married his sister instead, who was much easier to find and less inclined to be trouble and wasn't called Peter. or Paul. Or Michael.


8 The Road to Gretna Green (1975) - historical drama based on a true story, in which Martin Jarvis was a bounder who abducted teenage Rosalind Ayres (his rl wife) out of school and tried to take her to Gretna to marry her and that is a sentence that does weird things to my head thinking about it and listening to it happen. But it was good! It's just actors have peculiar lives sometimes. (It's not as bad as Karen Archer and David Collings, but we won't go back to the whole sex on the radio thing until next time David Collings turns up in one of these in the 1980s. /o\)


That is not even all of the 1970s Martin Jarvis Saturday Night Theatre installments I have listened to! But it is enough for one post.

Anyway, in short, if they interest you, they are all good adaptations/plays and the only hang up is that a couple of them do (understandably, as older off-air recordings) have poor audio.

corvidology came up with this idea, which sounds much more fun than shit-posting:



I don't know if I'll post every day, but I also don't know how to be short about stuff I love. Anyway, I just randomly discovered (via someone linking some of the others on tumblr) that someone's reuploaded a lot of the Thriller episodes onto YouTube. (If you remember, the ones I started epically picspamming for the lols before I gave up - there were 30+ episodes okay - and which mainly involve Americans getting randomly menaced every time they visit the UK). Including, yes, you've guessed it...

Good Salary, Prospects, Free Coffin, aka the One Where Julian Glover and James Maxwell move in together and bury girls in the back garden. Theoretically this is because they're spies with a ridiculously complicated and improbable plan, but it actually involves Julian wearing manly pullies and digging graves while sneering at James Maxwell for reading classic lit and wearing cardigans and vaguely angsting about all the murdering going on.

Plus, it has the proper number of Americans getting menaced, natty knitwear, Keith Barron is randomly the world's worst boyfriend, and basically it is 1 hr and 10 minutes of pure beige cheese.

I have a lot of things I love with people I love in and I could recommend many of them and rhapsodise about them. This is not one of those, but, let's be honest, I have watched this too many times since liadt sent me a piratey version and since I got the actual anthology myself. I just wish it was a sitcom with less murdering and more episodes.

Thriller was not really for me, but I did enjoy the starry casts, the supernatural ones (like the one where Diana Dors is Satan and Patrick Troughton is a drunken priest) and the ones that were pure cheese. I also liked Suzanne Neve getting to sword fight and seeming truly nice and normal before she tried to bake people in ovens and I was highly amused at Brian Clemens' determination to menace any and all Americans who dared to cross the Atlantic.* But mostly I love the above piece of 100% cheddar. (Alas poor Babs, though! Too dim to live.)

I think this post is totally in the spirit of both memes.


* Thriller was an ITC film series, made with US money. The US backers liked to see American characters in leading roles. However, in Thriller that starts to look like something they should have thought through a little bit harder, much to my amusement...

My fic is now a thing! It's very weird, I know, but hopefully also entertaining, and at last Count Scarlioni has fic. This involved having to rewatch City of Death for research, which, as you must admit, is about as good as research gets. (I also listened to the commentary and Julian Glover wanted to know about Scaroth's love life/lives, so I felt all vindicated for writing weird borderline-shippy fic. I mean, if Julian Glover asked for it, who am I to disoblige? ;-p)

Anyway, my entry for the Minor Characters Ficathon 2017:

Author: lost_spook
Title: Gothic Romance
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 7369 words
Characters/Pairings: Scaroth | Count Scarlioni/Clara Splinter, Great Intelligence Splinter (plus bonus guest appearances).
Notes/Warnings: For inevitable Clara splinter death, mainly, plus slight forced marriage of convenience dodginess. With many thanks to Persiflage for beta-ing it at short notice. Written for dw_guestfest 2017; also for the dw_allsorts prompt “love is done,” trope_bingo square “fake relationship,” and hc_bingo square “tentacles.”
Summary: It is a fact universally acknowledged that any beings splintered in time will inevitably run into each other. No law says it has to end well, though…

Gothic Romance (on AO3) | at the Teaspoon (awaiting approval as yet).

*goes off to have lunch*

While I was ill I also rewatched most of Mr Palfrey of Westminster (starring Alec McCowen, Caroline Blakiston, and Clive Wood) and remembered how good it was once it got going (and how little of it there is, sadly) so it was my next choice for an icon set.

Teaser:



( Our country right or wrong. We leave small matters such as crises of conscience, fastidiousness over the truth to traitors )

Credits: Screencaps my own; textures by tiger_tyger, wolfbane_icons and imemime_art. The usual rules apply: want, take, have, credit, comments are ♥ and hotlinkers will be interrogated.

(Finally finished it!! \o/)

Part Two: Recurring Characters & Episode Guide.

From jjpor: It's the morning after the revolution before. The Evil Empire has fallen; the Plucky Rebels won against impossible odds, as Plucky Rebels tend to do. Now they've just got to deal with the messy aftermath and, you know, actually govern the place. Preferably without becoming like the regime they've just defeated.


HEROES OF THE REVOLUTION

"The state has failed us, over and over, so we decide ourselves who to protect and who to betray, who to save and who to kill. This was no more, no less than that. Another act of conscience, if you like. Let's call it the final act of revolution - and remember we're all complicit in the crime."

A critically-acclaimed but long-forgotten 13 episode drama series from 1973/4 that starred Gemma Jones, Alfred Burke, Julian Glover and Diane Keen.

Set in the near-future in an alternate (but not too different) reality, where a tyrannical regime has been in power in Britain for nearly three decades, a group of freedom fighters led by a man known as "Arran", finally defeat the dictator Hallam - and then a new battle begins, one where the lines are even less clear than before. It explores the ethics of power as a drama plays out between the victorious rebel leaders, the remnant of the old guard, and those who want to find more peaceful solutions for the future.

( Sentimentalists are going to destroy the country )