Beyond the Roundels

How difficult this week has been is reflected in the fact that the most exciting part of this post happened on Saturday and I took this long to come here and flail about it loudly.

1. You may or may not recall, back when I first started trying to collect and listen to all the full cast BBC Radio installments containing Martin Jarvis, that I ran into a serial called The Twelve Maidens from 1971 that may or may not have still existed and certainly hadn't been repeated any time in the last 50 years, nor did it seem likely to be, and I was taken enough by the description to hunt down the novelisation, as I talked about here, last year.

Well, guess what? Apparently BBC Radio 4xtra has request weekends, and people called Colin and Steven can just email them and ask them to rerun random SFF serials from 1971, and they just go, okay, and do it and so... I've been listening to it!! I've heard the first two eps! It is pretty much exactly as the book suggested and very enjoyable and easy going so far.

Each ep is up on BBC Sounds for 4 weeks after broadcast (so don't wait for completion; eps1-2 will be gone before eps 5-6 arrive) and you can listen to it here from anywhere in the world: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0021q9s

\o/

I only found this because I was very bored and restless while supposedly resting on Saturday(?) afternoon, and thought I'd browse through categories of drama on BBC Sounds just in case. I squealed and nearly fell right off the bed instead of being duly calmed and distracted. (sovay got my initial squeaking by me being incoherent trying to dreamwidth on my phone, which nobody deserves.)

I honestly thought it must be incomplete from what little I knew of it.

But apparently if you're pining for something from the archive, you can just email the beeb at radio4extra@bbc.co.uk and hope they take pity on you. I can't believe that includes this, but I am delighted and looking forward to the next ep after it goes up post broadcast tomorrow at 4.30pm.


2. My browsing was inspired by me finishing Hamlet (1971), which I enjoyed very much - I am discovering that, provided I already know the play, Shakespeare on radio can really work for me. They can't be ponderous, the way some of the BBC TV Shakespeares can at times, they can get amazing casts (radio's probably the quickest medium to make, so people can fit it in), plus there's an intimacy with the radio format that makes it more emotive to me. Which is to say that this play was 3 hours and I would have sworn it was two. And I wasn't even all that taken with Ronald Pickup as Hamlet! (I mean, I still enjoyed it, so obv he was good; I couldn't have with a bad Hamlet, but, you know, whichever Hamlet will be 'my' Hamlet(s), I have not yet found. It wasn't BBC TV's Derek Jacobi either, so really no shade on Ronald Pickup. Obviously, I enjoyed Martin Jarvis as Horatio, but I particularly liked Robert Lang as Claudius and Angela Pleasance as Ophelia, too.)

As I mentioned in another post a while ago, most of the same cast reprised their roles for the 1978 radio Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, starring Edward Petherbridge & Edward Hardwicke, with Freddie Jones as the Player and Martin Jarvis as Hamlet (he was Horatio in the 1971, but played Hamlet on stage in between the two performances). I was entirely new to this, save very confused osmosis, and I also enjoyed this a lot AND am now more knowledgeable and enlightened. \o/ (My own enforced radio literary education programme via Mr Jarvis; it seems to work.) sovay informed me that Edward Petherbridge originated the role of Guildenstern on stage, so it was even cooler than I thought, and it was also adapted by Tom Stoppard himself.


3. After that, and prior to random miracle repeats, I got determined to find something good to listen to, because I'd been having a run of lesser SNTs, some with as much as five whole minutes of David Collings in them somewhere, and things like that, which wasn't good enough for summer.

I found a couple of possible things in the BBC Radio collection on Internet Archive, but was very intrigued by the sound of the SFF series, Pilgrim, which I discovered there. The first episode wasn't great, but I did like Paul Hilton as William Palmer/Pilgrim himself very much, and since I assumed it couldn't have run for 9 series if it didn't improve, I tried the second episode & that was much better, and promises to be the right sort of summer listening I was after.

Pilgrim or William Palmer is a Canterbury pilgrim cursed to eternal life by the king of the Greyfolk for insulting him on the road in 1185, and now he wanders around doing errands for the king, and/or helping ordinary people caught up in Greyfolk business or trying to find a way to end his own curse. As well as the IA link, there are a couple of (s9) episodes on BBC Sounds at the moment here.

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.

I keep forgetting to carry on re-uploading my icons that were originally hosted on tinypic and PhotoBucket, but sovay has been watching Mr Palfrey of Westminster lately (!) and that reminded me that I was thinking I should re-upload those next. When I went to find them, the set I did turned out to be part of my icons200 project, so I found the template (because some of them definitely make more sense with the categories).



( Our country right or wrong... )

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.

I made myself get on and post this (always best to do something at least a little bit constructive)!


For those new to these parts, there exists a meme, a monster of a meme called "I Surrendered", where you get given prompts & make up TV shows and then the whole thing eats your brain. Naturally, being me, last time I used one of my prompts to make up a fake 1970s show (it was properly gloomy and everything) - and then it ate my brain even more than usual. (I might be writing fic for it for runaway_tales now).

Then Liadtbunny said something more recently about doing a prequel, at which I laughed at the idea - and then went off and plotted the whole thing out.

Thanks to everyone who helped out when I failed on suitable 1970s actors for one of the leads - your suggestions were all awesome, and it was a tough casting decision. (I'm still not sure the best man won, but don't tell him that.) (As part of the meme, I may pretend the show is real. It isn't. Obviously.)


***


When I posted about the 1973/4 drama series Heroes of the Revolution, some people seemed to be under the impression that there was, or was meant to be, a second series. This was never true - it was always conceived of as a one-off serial. However, what isn't as well known is that 1975 saw a prequel in the shape of mini-series Divide & Rule, the equally cheery tale of the downfall of the last government and the dictator Thomas Hallam's rise to power in the late 1950s, and that may have been what people were thinking of.





"Don't you know that Mr Hallam is going to save the country? Just don't stand in his way..."

1958: The ongoing crisis in Britain worsens by the day and the government don't seem to be doing anything to improve matters. Politician Thomas Hallam has a plan, a vision of what could be done to save the country from ruin, but some of the more established cabinet members don't want to listen. Some of them even seem to imagine the crisis will pass if they wait long enough. Well, Hallam's done enough waiting and he's not going to stand by and let the country fall apart.

Standing between Hallam and his goals: several cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister himself. One by one, they'll fall...

( I did these vile things out of cowardice. I offer no excuse... )

I said I'd made a post about Enemy at the Door, and here it is. (I'm thinking of doing some more fandom manifesto type posts for old TV I've watched, because they're fun and possibly even useful, if only to inform people of things to avoid. :-D)

So, what is it? Enemy at the Door is a 1978-80 UK drama series about the German Occupation of the (British) Channel Islands in WWII, focusing on Guernsey (and the fictional Martel family). It stars Alfred Burke, Bernard Horsfall and Simon Cadell with Antonia Pemberton, Emily Richard, Simon Lack, John Malcolm, Richard Heffer, Helen Shingler and David Waller. It was created and script-edited by Michael Chapman, produced by Tony Wharmby and written by Michael Chapman, James Doran, NJ Crisp, Kenneth Clark and John Kershaw. There are 2 series of 13x 50 min episodes (26 in all). It is out on DVD (definitely in Regions 1 &2); it is not on YouTube at the moment, though. (It was repeated on Yesterday, a freeview channel here in the UK last year, so it may get another turn.)

If you're not keen on old UK TV, then this obviously isn't for you. If, however, you are, and you are interested in well-written, well-played, low-key drama, WWII generally, or what happened to the Channel Islands in particular, then it may well be. Sadly, it was cancelled before they reached the end of the War, but what there is of it is well worth watching. Also, while it was shown pre-Watershed over 30 years ago (so there's very little they can actually show in terms of blood, violence etc.), it does deal with a lot of difficult subjects (very well generally): execution, imprisonment, depression, multiple suicide attempts, shooting, murder, possible rape, and beatings/interrogations.

Why, you may ask, especially after that cheery list of warnings? Well, it depends. If you want a lot of action and battles and other such fast-moving set-pieces, again, it's not going to deliver. But it explores its historical subject pretty accurately and also takes advantage of that situation to explore the ethical dilemmas of occupation from both sides with subtlety and intelligence and three-dimensional characters, and that's what's so great about it.

( You chaps have commandeered my kitchen! )

Sorry, flist, but I thought (being as no one else has done a batch of even rubbish icons for Vengeance on Varos), that I would dare venture onto dwicons with my sorry efforts. It is a slightly different post at least...

( Varos icons )