Beyond the Roundels

Another little ficlet for this round of no_true_pair, this one I managed to cobble together with a context-less snippet I scribbled a while back, for the prompt "March Twenty-Eighth - Seven & William Palmer are on a boat."

Merrypool Lake (828 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Pilgrim (Radio), Doctor Who (1963)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Seventh Doctor (Doctor Who) & William Palmer (Pilgrim)
Characters: Seventh Doctor (Doctor Who), William Palmer (Pilgrim), Original Characters
Additional Tags: Crossover, Ficlet, Community: no_true_pair, Community: 51pluscrossoverfandoms, Fae & Fairies, Community: allbingo, Community: genprompt_bingo
Summary: Of all the tales told on these islands, few are as strange as that of William Palmer, except, of course, for those relating to another near-immortal traveller - the Doctor.

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.