Tag: BBC

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". . . to hear this entertaining piece": By the Fire with Belloc’s "Matilda"

Well, I’m continuing my week before the wireless, taking in the BBC’s varied fare. It is just the thing to do on a gloomy day like this, especially when there are so many other things to be done. Though I am not literally sitting before an old bakelit set, but by the fireside instead, with the BBC’s digital “Listen Again” page for a dial, I am feeling a certain kinship to the channel hoppers of yore who went in search of sounds to sound off about.

I am reminded, in particular, of a reviewer for the American Mercury who kept his post for seventeen hours straight on a wintry Thursday afternoon in early 1932. “O my country, my country, the pains are so great you must be growing up at last!” that worn out tuner-in concluded:

A radio playlet, a love scene in which a young man and a young woman tip over a canoe. “I love you so much, I hate you . . . you, you darling!” . . . Some jokes. “When he sat at the piano somebody had pulled the stool away”. . . Dialogues between a grumpy, nasal Sherlock Holmes and a foreign villainess. “That seals your fate, Madam” . . . A young business-like voice invites those who want to make money in their spare time to “meet with me personally” at 500 Fifth Avenue, room 525, tomorrow morning. . . The Lucky Strike Hour, perhaps the best of all air jazz orchestras, with interpolations by the confidential gutter voice of Walter Winchell. . . .

Indiscriminate listening is likely to trigger similar responses today, even if those dialing or downloading the BBC’s offerings are at least spared the sales talk with which we are being accosted elsewhere. Equipped with a copy of the Radio Times, I listen selectively. As a result, my date with the wireless was like a retreat into a well-stocked library, except that it was a lot noisier.

Tuning in BBC 7, I found myself on the Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, retraced in a four-part dramatization of Smollet’s 1771 novel. Over at BBC 4, I fished for Books at Bedtime, the catch of the day being Augustus Carp, Esq. by Henry Howarth Bashford (1924). Then, catching up with last Sunday’s Adventures in Poetry, I bid farewell to “Matilda—Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death,” and whose epitaph is currently celebrating its 100th anniversary.

Hilaire Belloc’s poem was read by children’s author Michael Morpurgo and commented upon by two pint-sized Matildas whose observations were far more engaging than the choice remarks of their scholarly elders. The girls understood that their namesake was getting burned for trying not to be bored:

For once, towards the close of day,
Matilda, growing tired of play
And finding she was left alone,
Went tiptoe to the telephone
And summoned the immediate aid
Of London’s noble Fire-Brigade.

Now, let’s examine Matilda’s situation from a listener’s perspective. Quite clearly, the girl was sick of listening, probably because she never got to ride the airwaves, where listening is an activity quite distinct from obedience, provided the ear is connected to an open mind. Instead, she insisted on making herself heard. Calling the fire department, she did not simply order the home entertainment that was wanting—she created it. Long before Orson Welles and his team staged “The War of the Worlds” to such startling effect, there was Matilda, getting a show on the road.

Not that her ingenuity was appreciated by her aunt, who was obliged “to pay / To get the men to go away!” Rather more thrilling than picking up theatricals on the electrophone (aforementioned), the dial-a-drama incident resulted in a further curtailing of Matilda’s amusements:

It happened that a few weeks later
Her aunt was off to the Theatre
To see that interesting play
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.
She had refused to take her niece
To hear this entertaining piece:
A deprivation just and wise
To punish her for telling lies.

I’m not sure whether Matilda would have found hearing Mrs. Tanqueray nearly as “entertaining” as the issue of her lupine effusions. She was never to experience that middle-class chestnut, which would be warmed up or roasted often enough on US radio, well into the 1930s; but melodrama came home after all, even without access to the wireless:

That night a fire did break out—
You should have heard Matilda shout!
You should have heard her scream and bawl,
And throw the window up and call
To people passing in the street—
(The rapidly increasing heat
Encouraging her to obtain
Their confidence)—but all in vain!
For every time she shouted “Fire!”
They only answered “Little Liar!”
And therefore when her aunt returned,
Matilda, and the house, were burned.

Matilda just wasn’t cut out to be a newscaster, I guess, even though she had that Hearstian knack for bringing events into being by proclaiming them. Still, if she had been as good a liar as Mr. Belloc made her out or up to be, why did she ever grow “tired of play” in the first place?

What I have gathered from listening to this cautionary tale, however spurious, is this: If you don’t want to get burned and end up paying too dearly for your amusements, give listening another try . . .

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Going His Way: The Bing Crosby Trail

Well, I’m on his way. Instead of Going Hollywood, where the WGA strike is beginning to make itself felt, I am listening all this week to the BBC, taking in drama, music, and talk. Late to catch up, I started on The Bing Crosby Trail, a six week tour whose first installment took me on a road to California, New York City, and Spokane, where listeners get to meet the daughter, the widow, and many of the contemporaries of the man known as Bing.

With The Bing Crosby Trail, producer and host Michael Freedland, a prolific biographer (whose audio portrait “Danny Kaye: UNICEF’s Jester” is available online until 12 November), attempts a departure from the traditional approach to telling a life story: “This is not just another biographical series,” Freedland insists in his introduction. “You could say it is more in the way of geography than history.” He also issues a “warning” to those about to follow him: “No obvious star names on the roster here. No sycophantic interviews with actors or other singers who, in Bing’s lifetime, called him great to his face and whispered other things behind his back.”

Instead, Freedland has been traveling around the US, “talking to people whose life Bing touched.” Not that those he interviews are nobodies: Buddy Bregman (“Bing Sings Whilst Bregman Swings”), veteran Paramount producer A.C. Lyles, and historian Ken Barnes (who produced the CD box set “Swingin’ With Bing”) have all gone on Freedland’s record.

“My life is like an open book,” Bing is heard singing (lines from his “That’s What Life Is All About”); and the man with the microphone who is out to capture that life is taking Bing by his word. Not content to “glance back through the pages” of printed volumes, he tries to pick up bits and pieces that perhaps never made it into any biography. Sounds good to me.

And yet, the cross-country Crosby Trail gets lost on a Road to Utopia, an ambition that must remain a dream. Freedland has gone out of his way to come away with comparatively little. The tour is not off to a promising start. We are take on a “winding mountain road above Malibu” to hear Mary Crosby sharing the insight that her father enjoyed playing golf and liked to whistle a lot. Does one really have to travel way out west for such a soundbite?

A subsequent inspection of Bing’s statue at Gonzaga University in Spokane and a tour of the Student Center housing the Crosby Museum are altogether misguided in their visual-mindedness. I’d rather be listening to Bing whistle than being given this runaround, blindfolded. At times so glossy as to make me cross, the Crosby Trail is a gross betrayal of the medium.

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Napoleon Solo Dynamite: Robert Vaughn “Behind the Iron Curtain”

Well, it wasn’t exactly the Summer of Love, back in 1968, when American film and television actor Robert Vaughn, then known to millions of Americans as “Napoleon Solo” came to Czechoslovakia to play a Nazi officer in The Bridge at Remagen. Four decades later, Vaughn got the opportunity to share his experience in Tracy Spottiswoode’s radio play “Solo Behind the Curtain.” The play aired last Monday on BBC Radio 4.

Now, Spottiswoode told me about “Solo” some 18 months ago when we sat in the kitchen of her Cardiff home (as mentioned here, in passing); by now, I had almost given up on ever getting to hear it, especially since I have visited Prague in the meantime and dined at the Cafe Europa on Wenceslas Square, where Vaughn enjoys a cool drink and the warmth of late spring as the play opens.

In a nod to Vaughn’s most famous role, “Solo” comes on like a 1960s spy thriller, with suave Vaughn feeling “pretty sure” that he was “being followed. In those days, there was nothing surprising in that. An American in an Iron Curtain country, during the Cold War. It would have been unusual not to be followed. What was surprising, though, was just how pretty she was.”

Her name is Pepsi (wonderfully portrayed by Serbian actress Vesna Stanojevic), and she is used to being called “bubbly.” Perhaps it is her blood (Pepsi’s father was American communist who, in a moment of nostalgia, named his daughter after the soft drink he could no longer enjoy in his wife’s homeland of Czechoslovakia). The smart if malapropism prone young woman, who serves as the crew’s interpreter, is proud of her country’s relative freedom, but eager to leave with the Americans as those freedoms are being crushed.

Vaughn is an excellent narrator, as his father Walter had been, back in the mid-1940s, when he narrated wartime propaganda plays like “Assignment USA” for the series Words at War, aside from appearing on thriller programs like Murder at Midnight and Gangbusters.

Unlike his father, Vaughn was busy exposing propaganda, rather than delivering it. During the time of the filming, he was at work on his doctoral dissertation, which was later published as Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting. As you will hear, it very nearly got lost as a peaceful spring gave way to a bloody summer.

His is not the voice of a 35-year-old, to be sure; but Vaughn draws you into his story all the same as he recreates his experience shooting in Czechoslovakia . . . until the shooting began in the streets. In August 1968, a short period of reformed communism under Alexander Dubček, known as the Prague Spring, came to an end as Soviet tanks rolled into the city. Not that Vaughn was ready to say U.N.C.L.E. and get stranded in a country hostile to the west in general and a film crew in particular, engaged as it was in firing explosives and blowing up things to restage a war for maximum box office impact.

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Brandishing the Pen: The War of “Seeing It Through”

Well, this is Guy Fawkes Day (or Bonfire Night) here in Britain. I am hearing the fireworks exploding as I write. Last year, I dragged Tallulah Bankhead into the Popish Plot; but it really seems an occasion to handle something explosive. To write about war and propaganda, or the war of propaganda, for instance. Bonfire Night coincides with the third anniversary of my move to Wales. So, I might as well write about something relating to the Welsh. And since this 5th of November is also the first day of the WGA (Writers Guild of America) strike that is intended to cripple the television and motion picture industry in the US, I might as well express my solidarity by turning a deaf ear to overseas media and lend a keen one to the voices of Britain.

Propaganda, a Welsh Prime Minister (pictured), and a group of famous authors including H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, and Arnold Bennett—“Seeing It Through” promises nothing less.

“Seeing” is the latest radio play by Neil Brand—last seen here in Wales accompanying The Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918). Dining with the writer, I remarked that, these days, the BBC seems most interested in airing biographical or historical drama. No exception is today’s Afternoon Play on BBC Radio 4, Tracy Spottiswoode’s “Solo Behind the Iron Curtain” (starring Robert Vaughn as himself, caught in revolutionary Prague anno 1968, and reviewed in my next entry into this journal). What sells these days are purportedly true stories, opportunities to eavesdrop on prominent, eminent or at any rate historical personages.

If it is to fly, the drama of the air is expected to have weight, especially now that such texts are generally being relegated to the footnotes of popular culture. Those in charge of allotting time for aural play try to salvage a dying art gasping for air by turning recorded sound into sound records and reducing storytelling into a substitute for oral history. A footnote-and-mouth disease is contaminating the airwaves, a corrupting influence in the theater of the mind for which there exists no talking cure. For the record, Brand has not so much caught the disease than braved it.

Cinematic in its architecture, in its designs on the mind’s eye, “Seeing It Through” opens like a house of worship, resounding with a hymn whose words are based on John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, written in imprisonment: “He who would valiant be / ’gainst all disaster, / Let him in constancy / follow the Master.”

The music gives way to the sounds of a crowded auditorium and the words of one of the most famous British writers of the late 19th and early 20th century. None other than the man who invented The War of the Worlds: “You know me. My name is H. G. Wells,” the novelist addresses a conservative crowd and is very nearly booed off the stage, clearly not the master of his domain.

Wells was hoping to lend support to Charles Masterman, a liberal politician to whom we are introduced as he tries to promote welfare reforms. A gifted orator, Masterman disappears from the public stage to become the mastermind or mouthpiece of the newly established War Propaganda Bureau, Britain’s response to German duplicity. “There is no such thing as a clean war,” future Prime Minister David Lloyd George warns the radical idealist. “Then, Masterman replies, “we should create one.”

Rallied to aid him are the leading novelists of the time, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Hardy, Galsworthy and Bennett. As Wells is heard expressing it: “The ultimate purpose of this war is propaganda, the destruction of certain beliefs, and the creation of others.” Unlike the radio propaganda penned by US playwrights, poets, and novelists in the 1940s (as discussed here), their activities in publicizing an unpopular war was being kept a secret until well after armistice was declared.

As is revealed in a well-soundstaged scene symbolizing Masterman’s struggle to navigate the moral maze of a publicly invisible office, the alcoholic in charge gets lost in the structure he is meant to control. Trying to find his way, he relies on the guidance of a suffragette who once dared to toss pig’s blood in his face and whose brother is facing a breakdown on the front that she assisted in putting up: “I’ve learned,” she tells Masterman, that “there is no truth where war is concerned, except one: that the greatest cruelty is to let it go on when it could be stopped.”

She, too, operates under the influence, hers being Frances Stevenson, personal secretary, mistress, and future wife of Lloyd George, a woman Wells calls the “sphinx that guards the labyrinth of Whitehall.” It is in this nexus of oblique channels and hidden agenda that the lives of thousands are rewritten and expended.

That this is not merely a war of the words is demonstrated in noisy reports from the front and driven home in a sequence reminiscent of Howard Koch’s adaptation of Wells’s science fictional War: as London faces its first air raid, the weaponizers of words, Wells among them, look on and listen in the dark, Masterman speechless, his master’s voice overmastered: “If they’re smart, [the British public will] never trust any of us again.”

“Seeing” is a challenge to the audience. Instead of recounting an old if little known story, Brand puts listeners right a history in the making, thereby inviting us to draw parallels between the so-called Great War that was and the nominal anti-terrorism of the present, a war that some demand we see through while others struggle to see through it. Trying to make sense of the spin you will find yourself in, the acts of betrayal and false assurances you will overhear, you may feel yourself in need of another voice “Seeing [You] Through.” As in all history lessons that matter, this voice will have to be your own . . .

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In My Library: Radio Drama and How to Write It (1926)

The man behind the counter looked none too pleased when I handed over my money. This one, he said, had escaped him. The item in question is a rare little volume on radio drama, written way back in 1929, at a time when wireless theatricals were largely regarded, if at all, as little more than a novelty. In his foreword, Productions Director for the BBC, R. E. Jeffries, expressed the not unfounded belief that its author, one Gordon Lea, had the “distinction of being the first to publish a work in volume form upon the subject.”

Nothing to get excited about, you might say. I know, it is not exactly a prize pony, this old hobbyhorse of mine. Few who come across it today care to hop on, let alone put any money on it, particularly now that it has been put out to the pasture known as the internet, the playing field where culture is beaten to death. So, should not any bookseller be pleased to part with Mr. Lea’s reflection on echoes? Not, perhaps, when the money exchanged amounts to no more than a single pound coin. History often comes cheaply; it is the price for ignoring it that is high.

I had been on the lookout for Radio Drama and How to Write It while researching for Etherized Victorians, my doctoral study on old-time radio in the United States. After no volume could be unearthed in the legendary and much-relied on vaults of the New York Public Library, let alone anywhere else, I gave up the search, comforted by the thought that Mr. Lea was, after all, a British hobbyhorse fancier, far removed from the commercial network circus in which I had chosen to study that ill-treated bastard of the performing arts.

It helps to take the blinders off. After all, I spotted the obscure volume last weekend, on another trip to Hay-on-Wye, the Welsh bordertown known the world over (by serious collectors, at least) as the “town of books.” Now, I am always anxious to put my loot on display. And so, rather to let it sit on my bookshelf, I shall let Mr. Lea’s pioneering effort speak for itself:

It is asserted that no play is complete until it has an audience. This is untrue. One might as well say that a tragedy of emotion between man and wife, enacted in the privacy of their own drawing room, is not a tragedy, because the general public are not invited to watch it. A play is complete when once it is conceived by its author. But, inasmuch as this fallacy is still popular, playwrights still construct their plays with an audience in mind.[. . .].

Thus, Lea reasons, the stage play

must be such as can appeal to a crowd, as distinct from the individual. This is a difficult thing to do, but such is the power of crowd-psychology, that if the play appeals to a section of the crowd, the disparate elements can be conquered and absorbed into the general atmosphere. An audience may, at the beginning of the play, be a company of individuals, but before long hey are by the devices of stage-production welded into one mass with one mind and one emotion. If the play is incapable of this alchemy, it fails to please and becomes a thing for the solitary patron. 

There, then, are the conditions which govern the production of the stage-play, and [ . . .] within the limitations of the theatre are wonderfully efficacious. 

But, is it necessary to accept these limitations? Is there no other medium more flexible?

In stage drama there is “always the problem of the fourth wall,” the solving (or dissolving) of which lead to intriguing if unsatisfactory compromises. In a production of The Passing of the Third Floor Back, for instance, the footlights were turned into an imaginary fireplace. “[V]ery ingenious,” the author quips,

but the effect is that, when the players sit before the fire, you have the spectacle of people staring straight at you, and, unless you imagine yourself to be a lump of coal or a salamander, you don’t get the right angle.

I was reminded of my experience seeing What Every Woman Knows at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, which thrust me into a similar hot spot I did not relish.

Sure, sound-only drama can readily break the barriers of convention. Yet when Lea dreams of the new medium and its potentialities, he has technology, not commerce or politics, in mind. Whether state-run or commercially sponsored, radio was never quite as free and free as the air. The audience, its size and sensibilities, always mattered more than the voice of the single speaker.

Nor am I convinced that a play is a play without playing itself out before or within an audience, whatever its number. A thought must be communicated to mean, and indeed to be. It is for this reason that I air out my library from time to time, to dust off those forgotten books and share what I find there in this, the most flexible medium of all . . .

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Songs, Speeches, and Musical Spoons: The Noisy Closet of Marie Slocombe

How about taking that spoon out of your noodle soup for a tuneful interlude? Apparently, the Vietnamese get a lot of noise out of their flatware. Back in 1936, one woman, a BBC temp by the name of Marie Slocombe, set out to preserve such sounds, recorded for broadcast but to be discarded thereafter. This Saturday, I am tuning in to “Saving the Sounds of History,” a documentary about Ms. Slocombe and the origins of the BBC sound archive. There are rural dialects, the ancient harp of King David, and a bird song anno 1890 (more of interest, no doubt, if the captured talent had gone the way of the Dodo).

I have long been fascinated by natural and man-made sounds, endangered or representative, familiar yet fleeting. For years, I kept my own library of noise: New York City traffic in the age of breakdancing, the laughter of an old friend, the footsteps in the hallway of a former home—noises that conjure up scenes left out of pictures in an age before mobile phones and digital cameras.

Sean Street’s documentary perhaps overstresses the historical significance of “cupboard S,” in which Slocombe secretly stored the abdication speech of King Edward VIII, the recording of which the BBC did not wish to preserve. As Slocombe acknowledged in an interview, the speech (transcribed here), was available in the US, having been transmitted over shortwave throughout the world on 11 December 1936 and was rebroadcast in part on NBC’s Recollections at 30 back in 1956. As it was replaying in the US, it still sat hidden in Slocombe’s closet.

To this day, access to the BBC sound archives requires a trip to London; but “Saving the Sounds of History” at least creates an awareness of such treasures. Say, which sounds would you preserve? The spoons, if you ask me, are best kept in the bowl.

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The "Hat" Is Familiar

Well, I don’t drive. Sitting in the car for a few hours, as I have been on two separate trips to the south of Wales these last few days, and failing to make scintillating company for my partner at the wheel, I pass the time that always seems longer when the body is at rest while in motion by listening to comedy and quiz programs on BBC 4. Quick, witty, and thoroughly radiogenic, shows like I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and Just a Minute continue to provide the kind of smart broadcast entertainment introduced in America back in 1938, when Information, Please! premiered on the CBS radio network.

Like those present day BBC offerings, the Information, Please! program relied in part on well-known guest panelists, mainly writers and entertainers, publicly to make fools of themselves for our private amusement. Now, Information, Please! is still a darn good quiz program; but I tend to listen to it for information other than that requested by host Clifton Fadiman. The program sure tests the memory. It also attests to the transitory nature of what constitutes the memorable and the retrievable, trivia and common knowledge.

To me, the most intriguing questions of Information, Please! are raised by the very voices and names of those who answer. On this day, 18 July, in 1939, Information, Please! featured the voice of one Clarence Budington Kelland. Apparently, the speaker was deemed popular enough to become a celebrity guest guesser. Not only did he join a long list of Information Pleasers including Lilian Gish, Gracie Allen, Rex Stout, and Alfred Hitchcock, he was invited to return and second guess.

On an earlier edition of Information, Please! (the transcript of which was included in an anthology of Best Broadcasts), Kelland was introduced as an “ever popular” author “whose stories and novels have delighted millions” (23 May 1939). While it is clear that those millions did not bother to pass on their delights to future generations, it remains open to speculation just when the “ever popular” made way for “whatever,” the yawn of indifference.

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This [I believe] I Believe

Perhaps we are becoming rather blasé about the phenomenon of web journalism (commonly known and often derided as “blogging”). Many of us still write what we wish, refusing to succumb to the urge or promise of making monetary profits by agreeing to become the mouthpieces of commerce, thereby to surrender the opportunity of sharing something about ourselves other than our apparent greed. How much is it worth to you to write freely, to display whatever you are pleased and prepared to share, what you think, think you know or believe?

It used to be a rare chance indeed to make yourself heard in a public forum comprising of more than a room full of people. The media who can spread news or opinions beyond the small circle of our communities, they always seem to be owned or run by others, be it likeminded or otherwise. That sense of being removed or apart from the media is largely a misconception, at least in democratic societies, a misconception arising from the distrust or apathy of the individual who does not participate, let alone initiate debates. And yet, what went on the air was generally prepared for the listener-turned-consumer by those who chose to enter the radio industry, whether to teach, delight, or exploit.

How exciting it must have sounded to the radio listener of 1951 when a program called This I Believe premiered on CBS, soon to be heard by American and international audiences the world over. This week, BBC Radio 4 is offering an hourlong introduction to This I Believe, its origins, its creators (among them Edward R. Murrow, pictured above), and its participants—an eclectic group of housewives and luminaries).

So, what if you were given four and a half minutes—or no more than 600 words—publicly to express your beliefs (something thousands have done since the revival of This I Believe in 2003)? What would you say? Would you find the words—and the courage—to say it?

However easy it is to say I, I believe that it should take more than a moment’s haphazarding to examine and express one’s philosophy, provided such a philosophy, which lies beyond performance and conformity, can be formulated at all. Yes, it is far easier to say “I” than it is to add “believe” and to follow it with words that truly follow . . .

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Now on the Air: Charles Dickens, E. F. Benson, and Daphne du Maurier

Well, this is one for the minisodes generation: my weekend’s literary line-up, the CliffsNotes edition. Radio, like television and the movies, has often been accused of serving condensed milk from prize-winning cash cows grazing in the public domain, of chopping up the meat of literature into bite-sized morsels for ready consumption. There’s still plenty of that going on, even though far more than chopping and condensing is involved in the process of adaptation, an art of translation too often dismissed as mere hackwork.

I’ve been scanning the Radio Times for dramatic radio series now or soon playing on BBC Radio 4. As usual, I am woefully late to catch up. Since BBC radio programs are available online for seven days after their original broadcast, I’ve only got a few hours to take in the second and final instalment of the Classic Serial “Down and Out in Paris and London,” based on the autobiographical writings of George Orwell. I missed the first part; but the second one promises to take me to London in the 1920s, with a young Orwell as guide.

Also about to be removed from the archives are the first chapters of Mapp and Lucia, a serial based on E. F. Benson’s 1931 novel, which contains this peculiar exchange about mastering the difficulty of being hard of hearing:

“Mrs. Antrobus’s got a wonderful new apparatus. Not an ear-trumpet at all. She just bites on a small leather pad, and hears everything perfectly. Then she takes it out of her mouth and answers you, and puts it back again to listen.” 

“No!” said Lucia excitedly. “All wet?” 

“Quite dry. Just between her teeth. No wetter anyhow than a pen you put in your mouth, I assure you.”

Then there is Dickens Confidential, a series of six plays fictionalizing the life of the author in his “role of a campaigning newspaper editor.”

Upcoming this weekend is the first of a two-part adaptation of My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier (whose “Birds,” migrated to the wireless, I observed here a while ago). The motion picture version of du Maurier’s 1951 thriller was subsequently soundstaged in the Lux Radio Theater and broadcast on 7 September 1953. The author’s 100th birthday is being celebrated this year. She is currently the subject of several radio documentaries in which the settings of her stories are revisited in today’s Cornwall (to which I devoted a few posts last year).

That’s what I’ve got earmarked for the weekend. Time now to trade in the gems of literature for the gams of Betty Grable, whose Pin Up Girl I’m screening tonight. “Don’t Carry Tales Out of School,” indeed.

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Out of the Bag: The Fiction of Laetitia Prism

She could have run Hollywood. Miss Prism, I mean. You know, the governess in The Importance of Being Earnest who couldn’t tell a book from a baby. Summing up the ends (the conclusion as well as the purpose) of her novel, she explains: “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”  We know where her story ended up, of course; but what end did Miss Prism face, and what ends might she have served after and beyond Wilde?

Where do fictional characters go once their creators are done with them? What do they think, dream, or do between chapters or acts? Where have they been before entering the story their creators had in mind for them? Those are the question tackled by Celluloid Extras, a series of sketches now playing on BBC Radio 4.

What every governess knows: It is impolitic to point.

The practice of picking up familiar characters from the world of literature, disentangling them from the plots that contained them, and getting them back onto a public stage to let them tell us something else about themselves is hardly a novel idea. In January 1937, for instance, the familiar characters of Alice in Wonderland were released from the confines of “Copyright Lane” to mingle with Hamlet and assorted originals from Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and Martin Chuzzlewit in the free-for all of radio’s “Public Domain,” a play produced by the aforementioned Columbia Workshop. It is a tongue-in-cheek approach to pastiche that is both liberating and controlling of the afterlife and private lives of imaginary personages, who, even without those efforts, often do quite well in the minds of those who recall them from their excursions into drama and literature.

Natalia Power’s “Miss Prism, or the Dreadful Secret,” the first of those five Celluloid Extras promises the untold story of the absent-minded governess, whom last we saw being embraced by Dr. Chasuble, much to her delight. Now, I might have picked up some queer vibes, given that the Miss Prism I last experienced on stage was impersonated by a male actor; but Power seems to have gotten a similar impression, however her conclusions were drawn. And yet, Miss Prism seems to have been coerced into speaking up, if indeed the words coming out of her mouth were not put there by another. If it was her mouth.

In “The Decay of Lying,” one of the fictional characters through which Wilde spoke in his dialogued essays, remarked that the “only real people are the people who never existed.” In a postmodern dismissal of boundaries and binaries that would not have done for Wilde, whose stage plays and word plays depend on them, Power suggests that Miss Prism did exist as something other than the prism or lens of our changing mores, that she was, in fact, an acquaintance of the playwright to whom we are indebted for immortalizing her. By telling the fictive truth about imaginary people, “Miss Prism, or the Dreadful Secret” seems to be degrading the art of lying to a practice as indelicate and vile as tabloid journalism.

Giving Miss Prism a dirty secret (aside from the ones already out of the bag when the curtain falls on Wilde’s comedy) and by extracting it in a moment of alcohol-induced carelessness means to imitate life and, according to Wilde’s logic, to take it. Now that is character assassination.