The Fever (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Drama on 4: An Inspector Calls on Moscow (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Titanic: Ship of Dreams (Noisier) | BBC Sounds
The Rest Is Football: Daly Brightness (Goalhanger)
Private Passions (Radio 3) | BBC Sounds
Can Cate Blanchett seriously be considering retirement? She’d be exiting the spotlight at the peak of her powers if so, having this weekend followed her recent triumph in Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Barbican in London with an impeccable performance in her first major radio play.
Wallace Shawn’s The Fever is a 90-minute anticapitalist monologue that leaves the actor with no place to hide, finding her playing an unnamed, privileged Australian woman whose political and spiritual awakening has left her on the floor of her bathroom in a foreign hotel room. While a civil war rages in the impoverished country beyond, she lies racked with fever, conducting a forensic self-examination of her own ethics. Yes, the script becomes circuitous in places – hectoring in others – but on the whole it’s blistering stuff, keeping the listener on their toes as it swerves from ferocious to funny, enlivened in turn by Blanchett’s vocal colour and warmth or, still more powerfully, a haunted hollowness.
While there’s a contradiction in seeing this kind of material on the stage, given the high price of tickets, hearing it on the radio makes the listener uncomfortably aware of the play’s ability to skewer a very particular kind of affluent, liberal complacency and convenient collusion. And if a monologue delivered by a character alone on a stage is potent, having that voice reach you without any visual distraction only enhances the intimacy and interiority. Intelligently, Blanchett’s voice is left largely unadorned here; the score is minimal, and silence plays its own role.
Blanchett’s bravura turn is a helpful distraction at a time when the BBC’s commissioning of new and original drama has been found to have more than halved since 2018 – dire news given the corporation’s traditional role in nurturing new talent. Shawn’s work, in fact, dates from 1990, and while it still has bite – perhaps extra so today, given recent convulsions of the global economy – it is in many respects a safe topic. Another new play, Mark Burgess’s An Inspector Calls on Moscow, harks back to a time when this was not at all the case. It’s a drama marking the 80th anniversary of the first production of that most famous of anticapitalist plays, An Inspector Calls. The premiere took place not in the UK, however, but the USSR, where it got standing ovations. Starring Rory Kinnear as a righteous JB Priestley – deemed a “dangerous lefty” by the Conversative government – it’s tethered to the playwright’s opening-night speech, flashing back in time to capture moments from the play’s inception (he wrote it fast, intent on helping Labour win the 1945 general election) to its spurning by the London theatres.
There’s a plum role for Priestley’s dynamic wife Jane (played by Karen Ascoe), who gamely teaches herself Russian, and if the script occasionally reads like an Eng lit exam paper as it pays homage to the work’s strengths (chief among them being that it isn’t merely an anticapitalist play but a ghost story, a detective story, a morality play etc), it’s notably spry, and yields plenty of crisp, period-perfect witticisms.
As any high-school student of An Inspector Calls will remember, Priestley, in order to demonstrate Mr Birling’s arrogance and materialism, has his character declare the Titanic unsinkable. That this reference still does the trick shows how enduring our appetite is for stories about that fated vessel, and also how hard it might be to find a fresh way of telling them. A new three-part podcast, Titanic: Ship of Dreams, has nevertheless succeeded. It begins not with the luxury liner’s sinking but with its launch, an occasion of immense pomp, with JP Morgan among the spectators and a cannon-punctuated countdown. It was, says the show’s gently spoken presenter, actor Paul McGann, the Edwardian equivalent of a space launch at Cape Canaveral. There followed a suspenseful 62 seconds as the crowd waited to see if she would indeed float. She did, but even then another drama was playing out: a shipwright had been mortally injured, the ship claiming her first casualty before she’d set sail.
It’s an immersive narrative, made vivid by plenty of eye-popping detail (the Titanic’s rudder alone was the size of a cricket pitch) and a confidently factual approach that acknowledges conspiracy theories when it encounters them (there’s a suggestion that it wasn’t actually the Titanic but her sister vessel that sank), while also noting the many gaps and unknowables in the narrative (the lookouts’ binoculars were lost before departure and not replaced, but how much of a difference could the sighting the iceberg seconds earlier truly have made?).
Storytelling takes precedence, but additional insights are provided by a bracingly eclectic roster of experts, among them Julian Fellowes and a Belfast tour guide whose great-grandfather went down with the ship. That personal connection is compelling and it’s not the only one in this first episode, which takes the listener from the Titanic’s conception, over after-dinner smokes at a London dinner party, through the years of its construction. McGann’s own great-uncle was also on board. “Titanic McGann”, as he’s known in the family, has been shrouded in the kind of mystery that comes with poverty until recently, when McGann’s brother Stephen, of Call the Midwife fame, pieced the details of his life together. Born into a family that had come to Liverpool to escape the Irish potato famine, he grew up in the city’s North End, on a street described as the worst in the empire, doing as so many others from that tough neighbourhood did, and becoming a coal trimmer, one of the “black gang” toiling in filthy darkness in the ship’s belly. He did, it seems, survive the sinking.
If the Titanic feels poised to attract both aficionados and the casual listener, so too does another new podcast. Naturally, given that it’s hosted by Lionesses Rachel Daly and Millie Bright, Daly Brightness is about women’s football. But there’s more to it than that. As Daly jokes to Bright early on, “If you just talked about football all the time, I probably wouldn’t be speaking to you.” Its charm lies in their dynamic, one forged not just on the pitch but off. In episode one, they let us know that they’ll be beginning by “checking in” with each other, and also share funny stories (Daly apparently has “YOLO” tattooed across her left butt cheek) before moving on to talk about the likes of Bright’s role in Chelsea’s 2-1 FA Cup defeat of Liverpool earlier this month and how it feels for Daly to have retired from international football. Throughout, they’re both supportive and challenging, showcasing a natural chemistry that makes for easy, but also surprisingly compelling listening. It’s worth noting, too, that not only are they women in a sportscasting arena still dominated by men, but unlike their podcasting stablemates Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer and Micah Richards they’ve yet to hang up their boots.
Film-making, happily, doesn’t come with the early expiration date that a career as an athlete entails – ditto broadcasting and composing, two pursuits in which Michael Berkeley is still actively engaged aged 76. Even so, he’s a spring chicken compared with Terry Gilliam, his recent guest on Private Passions. The flagship Radio 3 interview show, conceived of and hosted by Berkeley himself, celebrates its 30th birthday this month – a feat indeed given that its format consists of a chat interspersed by pieces of largely classical music played in their entirety, unlike Desert Island Discs. And who better to celebrate with? Approaching 85, the Minnesota-born Python is, as Berkeley notes, “full of beans”, punctuating impish views and reminiscences with a frankly joyous giggle. He believes Leonard Bernstein’s “showtunes” were his best work, still listens to the soundtrack of Disney’s Pinocchio when he’s feeling down about the state of the world, and identifies with Richard Strauss (“he’s a little troublemaker”). On his days making telly with John Cleese and co, he recalls absolute freedom. “The BBC was so laissez-faire about the way they dealt with things,” he says, “there was nobody in charge except us.” Here’s hoping they’ll leave Private Passions alone for a good many years to come.
