Martians have taken over Radio 4, and not before time
Radio 4 is currently considering Mars, in fact and fiction. Constantly. Possibly to the point of exasperation. Yet it’s not surprising. So much change is happening so fast in the real world that it’s natural for us to imagine sudden invasion and what it’s like to live in a world occupied by aliens.
Saturday’s Afternoon Play was a new two-part dramatisation of The War
of the Worlds, HG Wells’s fable of Martians invading England. The novel first appeared as a magazine serial in 1897, was published as a book a year later and has never been out of print since. After 120 years, it remains a huge influence on literature, public consciousness, even real-life rocket science.
Melissa Murray’s dramatisation seems to be taking place somewhere between the Great Wars and it works well. The Martians’ arrival is foretold by observations of eruptions on the planet’s surface. The reality is, in the true sense of the word, terrible. Tentacled monsters in giant threelegged metal machines stalk rural Surrey, shooting lethal rays at anything in their path. People panic, take flight, try in vain to fight back. Part two arrives next Sunday.
Meanwhile, take a lunchtime walk
along the path Wells describes for his aliens in Following the Martian
Invasion (Radio 4, daily). Note how snooty these experts sound, comparing what they know now with what Wells imagined then. What they have to say about the abiding power of “invasion narratives”, wherever they are set, is useful. But think of every version of the original you know, (whether Orson Welles’s 1938 radio play, Jeff Wayne’s musical of 1969 or many another adaptation) and recognise its abiding power to capture our anxiety about sudden change to the world we know.
Fear spills out of Radio 4’s new Friday afternoon serial, Dangerous
Visions: Resistance, a trilogy by Val McDermid. It imagines what would happen if a virus were spread by infection but antibiotics didn’t work on it. Informed by real science (on the dangers of bad animal husbandry, poor sanitation, lack of effective diagnosis, overreliance on antibiotics), it envisions a situation inflamed by complacency and becomes a powerful new sort of murder mystery, more “what’s happening?” than “whodunit?” The starting place is a rock festival, the people are instantly recognisable, the imagined danger too close to reality to dismiss. Scary, but potent.
Usually on Sunday nights, the minute The Archers finishes, I switch over to Radio 3. Why? Because the comedies that follow never fit what I’d rather be thinking about. Last weekend, my hands were floury and I didn’t make it in time. So I listened, anticipating Ability by Lee Ridley and Katherine Jakeways was going to be a bit of a sermon about understanding disability. It wasn’t. It was an unexpected pleasure but not because its central figure was a sympathetic lad with cerebral palsy and a rueful sense of humour. It was because the inevitability of how his wish to live independently turns him, via his carer, into a drug dealer. This was a dark comedy that rang oddly true.
Not that drug dealing is comic. Listening to BBC Radio London last Thursday morning, I heard a mother talking to Vanessa Feltz about how she recognised her own 15year-old son, who had been missing for five weeks, talking about being a drug dealer on a social media site. This was drama out of the air. People rushed to ring in and compare similar experiences. Feltz, listening intently and responding constructively, brilliantly developed the connections between the callers. This wasn’t shock jock radio, intent on provoking fear and rage. It was about sharing experience and learning from it, a sudden revelation of radio as a bridge for strangers to cross and meet unexpected friends.
I have a friend who is, like many another, very cross that Brian Matthew is no longer on Radio 2 on Saturday mornings, presenting Sounds of
the Sixties. She understands that it’s not possible any more, due to his ill health. She doesn’t object (well, not too much) to Tony Blackburn taking his place on that show. What she’s furious about is that it now goes out at 6am, not 8am. So, she’s found a way around it. She listens to it on iPlayer, two hours and a bit after the actual transmission. She’s convinced many another listener will do the same and that the listening figures for Dermot O’Leary in the 8am slot will suffer a consequent drop. I think that if Dermot doesn’t calm down and stop talking about himself, he can manage that all on his own.