Tag: BBC

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The Transplanted Mind: A Caligari for Radio?

“Poor print.” That was all I had to say after attending a screening of Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (1920) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I was dreadfully disappointed. It felt like walking through an exhibition of Expressionist art in which all the paintings were covered in plastic, the lights dimmed, and the space brightened only by an occasional flash of a camera. I pretty much had the same impression when, preparing for a trip to Prague, I tried to take in Der Golem by exposing myself to the horrors of a cheap copy I had dug out of a bargain bin at a third-rate department store. You might as well experience these films on the radio, where the visuals are as clear and bold as you can make them, provided your mental camera is both creative and focused enough to take pictures that are worth keeping.

Tonight, BBC Radio 3 attempted no less with “Caligari,” a radio adaptation of Robert Wiene’s seminal horror film, one of the few classics of the cinema to rank among the top 250 films on the Internet Movie Database. In the exposition, poet/playwright Amanda Dalton slyly comments on the challenges of such a project. “Caligari” opens with the sound of a board (an advertisement for the fair, a title card for the film, a piece of scenery) being painted and hammered into position. The question this gesture begs is whether the brush and the hammer are being passed on to us. Are we the artist, the audience, or the subject? Can we choose? Must we?

A “strangely arresting” film that succeeds in giving “pictorial interpretation to a madman’s vision,” one early commentator (Carlyle Ellis) said of Caligari. Such a statement drives home that Caligari is itself an exercise in translation: a bringing to light and darkness the workings of a crooked, crazy mind in crooked, crazy images. Rather than a translation, then, Dalton’s “Caligari” (available online until 2 November 2008) should be performing nothing more—and nothing less—than a transplant, a projection of a madman’s vision onto the screen of our own mental theater, sound or otherwise.

By installing a narrator at the changing scene, “Caligari” insists on translating and interpreting, at times so facetiously as to undermine any sense of terror. Irritation, perhaps, but not anxiety. More clamorous and voluble than radio needs to be, Dalton’s frantic, play, whose light-heartedness is weighed down by anachronistic cliches like “over my dead body,” is, for all its irreverence, an unsatisfactorily literal transliteration. Too many voices shouting down our imagination, “Caligari” reviews familiar images it does not permit our mind’s eye to see, let alone re-envision or remake. A running commentary on the original on a familiarity with which it depends, “Caligari” plays itself out as a series of aural footnotes.

Last Friday, during an ostensible lecture on German film prior to a screening of Germany’s latest cinematic export, Die Welle (2008), I once again caught glimpses of Wiene’s seminal work; but its images were taken out of a context that the dull, rambling talk could not create. I had a similar attitude toward Dalton’s adaptations.

A few bars of the German national anthem, as it was once sung (that is, including the first stanza, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”), can hardly suffice in assisting us to adopt a Weimar Republican mindset; nor can mentions of an “intricate design” recreate an expressionistic set. And while a babble of tongues may make a failed democratic system audible, “Caligari” is little more than a poor substitute for the experience of either art or history.

Meanwhile, I am sure that the jack-o’-lantern I carved today (and display above) would look better on the air or in anyone’s mind, especially now that Montague, our terrier, has already begun to disfigure it. Is he adopting traits you may have decided to attribute to me?

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Taking a Name for Yourself: The Strange Case of Peter Lorre Vs. Peter Lorre

If only my father had been a serial killer. That’s what I thought, one afternoon, when I called the government office in charge of name changes. Regulations were so strict in Germany, the reason of doing away with your old moniker had to be something close to murder in the family. “We can only hope” is what I said to the bureaucrat on the other end of the line and, hanging up, gave up on the idea. I was just about to move to the United States and thought that it might be easier for me not to be “Harry Heuser” and face the prospect of being called “User,” as “Heuser” is so often mispronounced.

Now, I had no fancy alternative in mind; “Hauser” (as in Kaspar Hauser) would have done just nicely. I certainly did not try to free ride on someone else’s fame, faded or otherwise. That is what happened in the strange case of “Peter Lorre Vs. Peter Lorre,” a radio play by Michael Butts based on The Lost One by Stephen D. Youngkin; it premiered on BBC Radio Four this afternoon (1 September 2008) and was available here for listening until 7 September 2008. Having long had a fascination for the aforementioned Lorre, as well as onomastics, I was all ears.

“Peter Lorre Vs. Peter Lorre” is concerned with the final stage of the actor’s career, which coincided with those dark years in which aging Hollywood players found themselves crushed under the rubble of the old studio system that had cast them into stars. The 60s were cruel indeed; and many of the once highly paid players were reduced to accepting parts in low-budget horror films, about the only genre open to them. Sure, they could stop acting; but, for those who had made a living of it, this meant a kind of death; which is why many settled for gradual decay. In the case of Peter Lorre, who had been in the thriller business since his breakout role in Fritz Lang’s M, the decline had been more gradual still; he had been typecast so early in his career that he was soon reduced to caricatures. Just when Lorre was trying to push for a remake of M to restore the name he had made for himself, someone else was trying to claim it.

“Some fruitcake has filed a deposition,” his agent, Lester Salkow, informs Lorre, “He wants to use your name.” Determined to have this threat to his identity “stopped,” Lorre was puzzled nonetheless. “Why would anyone want to be me?” The “anyone” in question was Eugene Weingand, a Hollywood-based real estate salesman born in Germany in 1934.

“How would you feel,” the judge asks Weingand, “if your name was Peter Lorre and someone came in and wanted to use that same name after you developed it for a period of over thirty years?” To this Weingand made no reply; but, as Butts’s play has it, it got Lorre thinking and caused him to re-examine the worth of his name, not merely as a handle for salables but as a synecdoche of the self.

Weingand’s petition was rejected; yet, after Lorre’s death in 1964, he took the actor’s name for appearances in film and on television (in Get Smart, for instance), eventually settling for colourful parodies of Lorre’s ghoulish screen persona in cereal commercials. Weingand even claimed to be Lorre’s son, adding “Jr.” to his assumed name. Having just fast-forwarded through Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966) and spotted him in the scene shown above, I cannot deny the resemblance.

Nor can I deny the resemblance of Lorre’s voice to that of British character actor Stephen Greif, who is remarkable in one of the two title roles. So torn and identity crisis tormented is the aging Hollywood star he portrays that you might as well say that Greif is heard in both of the title roles. “Strange,” Lorre comments on Weingand’s story, whose statements he reads, slipping into the role of the deluded man to whose ambitions his life in the public eye gave birth.

 “I feel I know him,” Lorre tells his agent. Having so long played roles he would rather disown, Lorre could not bring himself to calling his namesake an impostor.

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Blood, Sweater Girl, and Tears: “A Night with Johnny Stompanato”

I’ve just been tuning in to “A Night with Johnny Stompanato,” an original radio play by British director-playwright Jonathan Holloway, which you may access via BBC’s iPlayer until 18 July 2008. Based on “real events, newspaper reports, and FBI files from the years 1957 and 1958,” this hourlong docudrama recounts a sordid chapter in the life of screen legend Lana Turner, whose teenage daughter, Cheryl, stabbed to death the titular character, the star’s possessive mobster boyfriend. “Real events?” Turner purrs. “Yeah, I guess. Personally, I’ve rarely met a man who could tell the truth when a lie would do.” So, this time around, Lana gets to tell her own story. With us, the radio audience as jury, she is going to court for us—which is to say, she’s going to court us—all over again.

Can Turner give the performance of her life now that her own life is at stake? Let’s be frank, the former Sweater Girl was neither known for her realist acting nor for her vocal talents, as I previously remarked here. Tuning in to Turner is not likely to make you turn on to her. There wasn’t enough “It” in her timbre to make Lana’s figure appear before your mind’s eye as you listen to Suspense thrillers like “Fear Paints a Picture.” In this Imitation of Lana, Laurence Bouvard is ably substituting—and, I found, vocally improving on—the departed screen icon, who never sounded as confident behind the microphone as she looked in front of the camera. You might say that Bouvard sounds more convincing than Turner—even though, to me, “the real Lana” has an oxymoronic ring to it.

Now, my days of thrilling to trash like Hollywood Babylon are long gone, as are my experimentations in hairstyles inspired by Lana’s late 1950’s coiffure. Still, I was looking forward to this racy little number. Unfortunately, it turned out to be rather dull—which is quite a feat, considering the material.

On the face of it, “A Night with Johnny Stompanato” is not unlike one of those femme fatale yarns produced by Suspense, in which tough-talking dames give you the lowdown on a crime they were involved in, until the first-person narration makes way for a dramatization of past events. In short, the past becomes present at pivotal moments in the story. The same formula is used by Holloway, except that the playwright dramatizes the court scenes, which in themselves are retellings, with Turner commenting on the proceedings. In other words, he lets the leading lady attest too much, so that we are told what has happened rather than permitted to overhear it.

One of the most dramatic moments of “A Night with Johnny Stompanato” involves Turner, then shooting Another Time, Another Place in London, attempting to have her increasingly violent lover deported. From her dressing room at the studio, Turner calls Scotland Yard but, “as bad luck had it,” Stompanato was trying to reach her “at the same time.” Sorry, Wrong Number came to mind; but that was my mind, not the playwright’s. Instead of dramatizing this potentially thrilling call, Holloway has Turner recall it for us in retrospect:

The dumb English broad on the switchboard opened the line for him, and he listened in on everything I said to the police. The detective put down the phone, and John’s voice came straight out of the earpiece. I practically dropped dead on the spot.

The dropping dead, though, is acted out for us, with prolonged gurgling and some heavy breathing. Stompanato’s silencing comes as a relief. As impersonated—or caricatured—by John Guerrasio, he sounds about as charming and enigmatic as Allen Jenkins.

“You know,” Turner confides in us at the conclusion of her report,

the most amazing thing about the whole Johnny Stompanato business? That I didn’t learn from it. Just kept right on getting involved with men . . . and having a really bad time getting uninvolved. I never learned from my mistakes, which, I am told, is what makes us different from the animals. Nope. I just kept right on making them.

The same goes for radio playwrights, I suppose; “instead of being dramatic, with action in the now,” aforementioned writing instructor Luther Weaver complained about 1940s radio serials, their narration “offers a post-mortem on what already has happened.” Don’t get me wrong. I am grateful to the BBC for trying to keep radio drama alive (a new adaptation of Cheever’s short story “The Enormous Radio” is being broadcast on Wednesday); but, as “A Night with Johnny Stompanato” demonstrates, dialogue alone does not constitute drama. There’s more tension in one of Lana’s discarded sweaters.

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Pointless to Return?: Journey Into Space, Fifty-five Years Later

As you may have gathered from my inordinately prolonged silence, I am currently forced to carry on beyond the limits of cyberspace; the aforementioned power cable refused at last to charge the old Mac (apparently outmoded at age 3 ½), preventing me not only from filing my reports but from getting at whatever files I have not yet gotten around or taken the care to transfer. While I have experienced my share of computer mishaps and malfunctions over the past few years, familiarity with such high-tech lows does little to alleviate frustration.

Perhaps it is just as well that I am returning now, albeit without my customary prolixity, by taking a return trip into space, where, as the old movie slogan goes, “no one can hear you scream.” Well, never mind the outbursts. Besides, I spent the afternoon away from the web by dipping my brush into the watercolors (as evidenced above) to mark another special occasion.

BBC Radio 4, where radio drama is still alive and, some claim, well, was being original today by offering . . . a sequel. Now, considering that entertainment these days is synonymous with recycling, that hardly seems anything to get excited about (even though, I, too, am looking forward to keeping up with the Indiana Joneses next month); but this sequel is certainly a departure—rather like the first return to Tara or the reopening of Bates Motel.

Nearly 55 years after its premiere on 21 September 1953, the science fiction serial Journey Into Space is being revisited, with author Charles Chilton, now in his 90s, picking up the threads of a yarn left dangling in suspended animation decades ago. “Journey Into Space: Frozen in Time” (available here until 18 April 2008) reintroduces listeners to Captain Jet Morgan, now aged 72, lost in space after over forty years en route to Earth (the first adventure, “Operation Luna,” was set in a futuristic 1965). Morgan is played by David Jacobs, the announcer for the 1953 series and the only surviving cast member of that production.

According to this week’s issue of the Radio Times, the original Journey “marked the last time radio drama ever got higher ratings than television.” A shame, really, considering that imaged sci-fi dates so poorly and is often mind-numbingly dull. The nostalgic charm of Doctor Who, currently back for another season on BBC TV 1, eludes me entirely.

Then again, I always thrill to the chance of letting my mind’s eye set the scene; and if the Journey is unlikely to attract quite the crowd lured to the tube by that overrated quack, it may yet succeed in getting the next generation of science fiction aficionados attuned to the non-imaged that has to be imagined, to the thrill of listening, of experiencing adventures in time and space as they were once offered by series like Dimension X and X Minus One.

It sure has been a while since that first outing into space. Back then, the merry crew dared to challenge their oxygen supply by enjoying an extra-terrestrial cigarette break. None of that nowadays, when staying alive for its own sake (or the sake of the ailing health care system) is deemed more important than those small pleasures of everyday living. Who needs aliens, forced as we are to distance ourselves from the past to become strangers to our former selves. . . .

Unfortunately, the BBC only gets it half right. Who, after all, remembers that first Journey Into Space? Whereas BBC TV 3 recently broadcast all three previous Indiana Jones adventures, the radio audience is not given a chance to catch up, being left in the dark as to the voyage thus far. A potentially thrilling reunion is rendered well nigh pointless, and certainly far less poignant. Luckily, recordings of the 1953 series are still extant—and you do not have to wait for the BBC to open its vaults. So, if you decide to get defrosted, you are better off to go back in time and start where it all began, during that troubled ”Operation Luna.”

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Enter Clemence Dane

Okay, so I got momentarily distracted tonight watching American Idol. It’s the only television show I am following these days; but immediately after the twelve anxious men have sung their way into or out of the finals (we are about two days late here in Britain), I am going to lower the blind to screen Hitchcock’s Murder! The arrival of the Gracie Fields DVD set earlier this week has let to a change in my movie diet, with Hollywood fare being put on ice for the duration. Not that Fields’s Love, Life and Laughter was such a gem; it struck me as a poor, distant cousin of The Smiling Lieutenant (recently released on DVD in the US). Last night, I screened Alfred Hitchcock’s peculiar romance Rich and Strange (1931). So, when I noticed that today marks the anniversary of the birth of Clemence Dane, co-author of Enter Sir John, the novel upon which Hitchcock’s Murder! is based, I knew what we would be watching tonight.

Born in England on this day, 21 February, in 1888, the woman who called herself Clemence Dane was a prolific and highly popular novelist-playwright whose works were adapted for screen and radio. The Campbell Playhouse, for instance, presented a dramatization of Dane’s 1931 novel Broome Stages, starring Helen Hayes. Dane’s best-known work, A Bill of Divorcement (which you may read here), was produced by the Theater Guild (1 December 1946) and adapted for Studio One (29 July 1947).

Dane’s screenplays were reworked for broadcasting as well; the Lux Radio Theater soundstaged both “The Sidewalks of London” (12 February 1940) and ”Vacation from Marriage” (26 May 1947).

What I did not know until today is that, like W. H. Auden (to acknowledge the birthday of another, far more enduring writer), Dane also conceived plays especially designed for listening. Did they “do” radio? is a question invariably on my mind when I consider the cultural contributions of 20th-century writers and actors who made a name for themselves in other branches of the performing arts. The answer, in Dane’s case, came to me from this latest addition to my bookshelves, British Radio Drama, 1922-1956 (1957) by BBC radio drama department head Val Gielgud (last featured here).

According to Gielgud, Dane’s The Saviours, was “without doubt” the “most distinguished contribution to Radio Drama during 1941.” Why these plays are no longer presented by the BBC is a mystery to me. Despite the continued popularity of radio drama in Britain, recordings of classic broadcasts are far more difficult to come by, whereas copies of the published scripts for The Saviours, a series of seven propaganda plays on the theme stated in the title, are readily available in second-hand bookstores online. Published radio plays, of course, are always second hand.

So, I resort to an irreverent account by playwright-actor Emlyn Williams (aforementioned) of his experience being cast by Gielgud in one of Dane’s earlier play, Will Shakespeare: An Invention in Four Acts (1921), broadcast in 1937 on the anniversary of the Bard’s birth (23 April). “In spite of the talkies,” Williams remarks in his autobiography Emlyn, “British radio was still a momentous force.” The thought of going “live” before an unseen audience of three million people was “paralysing.” Worse still was the atmosphere in the soundproof studio, a “dungeon” filled with microphones resembling a “regiment of robots,” each ded eye turnd bright red and stared at its victims.”

Present in the studio was Clemence Dane, whom Williams describes as an

outsize author with a handsome generous face topped by hair as overflowing as her talent.  It had been scooped hastily back into a bun and seemed about to come tumbling down and be sat on.

In a cascade of black to the floor, with a corsage of big happy flowers which accentuated her size, she looked as if, were the world not larger than she was, she would cradle it in her lap.  A photographer advanced to arrange the cast round her chair, just as she was handed a vast bouquet which she embraced with a beautiful smile.  She was a mother at a prize-giving where all her children had ended up First.

After all, this formidable woman is rumored to be the model for Madame Arcati, the delightfully eccentric psychic in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit (discussed here). Thanks to Williams’s first-hand account, I can picture Clemence Dane in the studio, even if I am not likely ever to hear her plays for radio. To think that the world is dead to the theatrical events of the air, that these offerings are being kept out of earshot. It’s enough to make a body scream bloody Murder!

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Lemon in My Tea

Well, make that Liz Lemon. I don’t watch a lot of television these days; but 30 Rock sure is my cup of Assam. Not since Seinfeld have I followed a situation comedy with such enthusiasm. Never mind that Fey’s nod to Jerry and his gang turned into just another plug for the stingless Bee Movie. It’s great to see SNL alumni like Tracy Morgan and Chris Parnell in something worth my while (that is, something other than SNL). Rachel Dratch’s Hitchcockian cameos in season one were inspired. And, for once, even the guest appearances (Carrie Fisher!) do not smack of desperation.

Apropos Lemon (still with a capital L): the BBC hit a new low last Saturday with the premiere of The One and Only . . ., a new reality show in which amateur impersonators of iconic performers like Frank Sinatra, Dusty Springfield, and Rod Stewart battle it out for a chance at a contract in Vegas. Nothing terribly wrong with the concept (unless viewers under forty were expected to call in their votes); but the so-called talent appears to have been dragged in straight from a deserted street corner or a low-rent shopping mall . . . in Andorra. It would make for a stellar 30 Rock episode.

Let’s see, Madonna, in her by now long-faded Material Girlishness, has a German accent to which American audiences are sure to thrill. And Lionel Ritchie? He’s a white guy in blackface. That’ll have them dancing on the ceiling over at the NAACP! You’d think the current WGA strike would encourage broadcasters in Britain to fill in the blanks smartly instead of shooting them . . .

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Sound Construction

Well, it has been particularly blustery of late; and, according to the BBC, Welsh coastal dwellers are to brace themselves for the fierce storms announcing themselves so boisterously. I am used to such noisy tidings by now. They are part of the seasonal soundscape of the Welsh coast, the otherwise quiet place to which I, romantically propelled, betook myself from the din of the metropolis.

Yes, I can take it now, the sound of the gales pushing against our cottage, the telling rattle of the letterbox long after the postal workers have made their rounds, the creaking of the beams and the lashing of rain against the glass drum of our conservatory, orchestrally augmented by the high-pitched screeching of the twisted willow branches scraping against the panes. Then there is that dictionary-challenging, onomatopoeia-defying shhhshing of the wind, as if nature were insisting on airtime, determined to shut me up, shut in as I am, surrounded by those ominous and still strange sounds.

Before heading out into that storm tonight, for company and a few drinks, I wrapped myself up in a sound cape of my own choosing, a blanket at once muffling and eloquent. BBC Radio 4 offered just that: “The Castle: A Portrait in Sound” (available here until 13 December). A portrait not unlike those produced by the Columbia Workshop in the 1930s and the CBS Radio Workshop in the ’50s (as discussed here), “The Castle” recalls the past of a Scottish stronghold rendered in spoken words, its present, the after-liveliness of its ruins, being captured by natural sounds.

When its palette is not muted by the welcome commentary that gives names to its noisemakers, the sonic portrait of “The Castle” reverberates with the spray of the sea, now stormy, now calm, with the buzz of insects and the chatter of swallows, of skylarks and kittiwakes, and the rather obscene squawks of the shags. The fabled invasion of Daphne du Maurier’s avian agitators (last heard here and currently being readied for another big screen attack) was brought vividly to mind.

If only the wind and rain were not messing with the wires again, making it difficult for me to sustain a wireless reception sound enough to get this “Castle” on the air . . .

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A Soundtrack for the Silent Era

Well, I am all ears again. After the visual assault described in the previous post, this constitutes a welcome reining in of the senses. Not that the experience is a tranquil one. I am listening to the sounds of war . . . the Great War. Presented by BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner, “The Sounds of Flanders” (available here until 30 November), introduces listeners to a collection of rare phonograph recordings produced for the domestic market in Britain, the “first form of saleable audio propaganda”—patriotic speeches, rousing songs, and soundstaged re-enactments of warfare.

The recordings, which include dramatizations of an air raid on an English coastal town and the attack on the RMS Lusitania made just weeks after the ship’s sinking, were unearthed by broadcast historian Tim Crook, who calls them the earliest surviving example of audio drama produced in Britain.

Not all of it was produced for the local market; apparently, some of these recordings were intended for an American audience in an attempt to rally support for the Great War. It clearly anticipates the shortwave transmissions of World War II, as described in Charles J. Rolo’s 1942 study Radio Goes to War (of which I am fortunate to have added to my library above copy signed by its author). As Rolo put it,

[radio]went to war on five continents shortly after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. In eight years it has been streamlined from a crude propaganda bludgeon into the most powerful single instrument of political warfare the world has ever known. More flexible in use and infinitely stronger in emotional impact than the printed word, as a weapon of war waged psychologically radio has no equal.

According to Rolo, “Nazi tacticians, unhampered by the deadweight of outdated traditions, had taken to heart the lessons of the last war and were elaborating for the future a strategy of war waged psychologically.” As “The Sounds of Flanders” suggests, those strategies may well have originated in the United Kingdom, even though the audio recordings were apparently not made by any branch of the government (a point in need of clarification).

As in the case of the electrophone wirecasts from the London stage during the reign of Queen Victoria (discussed here), those phono-graphic records antecede the first experimentations in broadcast theatricals, which began in the early 1920s.

Programs like “The Sounds of Flanders” help to restore the soundtrack for a generation that today is largely thought of as silent.

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Kaboom! Kerplunk! Ka-ching!

Well, being that I am off to Cardiff on Thursday to see the touring Young Vic production of Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, I thought I’d make this serial and comic strip week here on broadcastellan. “Blistering barnacles” and “Cushion footed quadrupeds”! I am smack in the middle of the “Funny Book War” as staged by Michael Chabon in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; and even though my comic treats were generally of not of the superheroic kind (to which this recent portrait attests), comics are very much on my mind.

It so happens that the aforementioned (and by now controversial) boy reporter and his creator are also the subject of the BBC Radio 4 documentary “Tintin’s Guide to Journalism” (available online here until 23 November). In this broadcast, which also features the voice of Tintin creator Hergé, journalist Mark Lawson investigates cases of real-life reporters who were inspired to enter their profession by books like King Ottokar’s Sceptre. In my case, comics simply inspired imitation.

The Germans are said to have papered the way to the comics with the picture books of Wilhelm Busch (Max und Moritz), which is where I started out as well. After graduating from the Katzenjammer Kids inspiring Max und Moritz, I became an avid comic collector, spending virtually all of my Taschengeld (distributed as it was back then in Deutsch Marks) on weeklies like Fix und Foxi.

Sigh! My family could not afford to have me shod there; but I still sneaked into the Salamander shoe stores to browse just long enough to grab my copy of Lurchi, another treat being the stories of Mecki the hedgehog I clipped from the pages of the German radio and television magazine Hörzu. More inclined toward the buzz of Maya the Bee than to the “THWIP!” of Spiderman, my comic book phase ended as I entered my teenage years. Make that my “comic reading phase,” since I kept drawing them. My own creations often mocked those among my pubescent schoolmates who kept up with the exploits of guys like Superman or The Phantom.

It was only after I graduated from the comics that I discovered a connection between cartoon bubbles and comic speech, the kind of connection to which the Americans owe the serial adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy, the kind of affinity that made it possible for New York City Mayor La Guardia to read Little Orphan Annie on the air during the 1945 newspaper strike.

Even though I had very little exposure to radio drama, being the walking TV Guide in my family, I created in the character of Inspektor Bullauge (Inspector Bull’s Eye) a comic for the ear. I made up the story as I played the parts, more interested in the sound effects I could use and record to bring my cardboard creation to life.

Zowie! Despite dedicating an estimated 300,000 words of this journal to popular culture (and radio dramatics in particular), I have never explored here the relationship between onomatopoeia and the equally imaginative world of sound effects . . .

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Amazons and Old Lace: Cranford Televisited

Well, this was one to watch out for. Not that I could have missed the announcements, given that the new five-part television adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford stories is the cover story of this week’s Radio Times. A grand production it is shaping up to be, judging from the first installment, which aired tonight on BBC 1. The television series borrows from several of Gaskell’s works; aside from the Cranford papers (published in serial form between 1851 and 1853), writer Heidi Thomas also draws on incidents from “Mr. Harrison’s Confessions,” the story of a young physician (serialized in 1851) and the novella My Lady Ludlow (serialized in 1858) to create what the Radio Times refers to, using that most horrid and hackneyed of adjectives, a “unique universe.”

Quaint or daring, Gaskell’s world is certainly uncommon in its Cukorian selection of characters. “In the first place,” we are told, “Cranford is in possession of the Amazons.” As is often the case, the version-maker of the current series chose to forgo the contrivance of voice-over narration, at a considerable loss of clever prose. That said (and however much there is left unsaid), the opening line is soon rendered visible to the televisitors of this fabled community, which, albeit, not entirely devoid of male bodies, is dominated by formidable females. Foremost among them are Judy Dench and Eileen Atkins as the sisters Jenkyns (pictured), ably supported by Imelda Staunton, Julia Sawalha, and the ever compelling Francesca Annis (last seen on UK television in the latest Marple mystery).

I was anxious to learn how my favorite moment would be dealt with, whether it would be told or dramatized. Surely it is too hilarious a scene to be omitted. I am referring, of course, to the aforementioned “pussy” incident. The treatment was, shall we say, rather graphic and indecorous, which is not to say that it was not wildly amusing.

Miss Deborah Jenkyns, that advocate of “[e]legant economy” who much preferred Dr. Johnson to the young author of the Pickwick Papers (then newly published), would no doubt have objected to the sound effects employed to dramatize pussy’s response to the “tartar emetic,” not to mention the shot of the piece of lace thus extracted. In the hands of the producer, this “anecdote” known only to a circle of “intimate friends” so civilized and reserved as to be “afraid of being caught in the vulgarity of making any noise in a place of public amusement,” becomes an attack on the Victorian fabric of Cranford that the worthy Amazons might have been spared.