Ray Brown Radio Plays & Readings

Ray Brown was born in 1941 in Yorkshire. He has written three plays for radio as described below, and some for stage.

He has also appeared on many discussion and features programmes. His features include Worlds Apart (talking about childhoods in different lands to a series of interviewees) and Down to Earth (five programmes about 'aircraft archaeologists'). He has worked with a large number of producers including Gillian Hush, Pete Atkin, Nigel Acheson and Tony Cliff.

Ray's radiodrama Wikia page contains more information.

NOTES ON THE RADIO PLAYS

Afternoon Play 14 Aug 2008 - Steinbeck in Avalon
Dramatised by Ray Brown from the writings of John Steinbeck. In 1959, John Steinbeck went to live in Somerset to write what he hoped would be the crowning glory of his distinguished career, a 20th-century version of the Arthurian legend. Steinbeck/Lancelot ...... Kerry Shale, Elaine/Guinevere ...... Barbara Barnes, Merlin ...... Philip Madoc, Arthur ...... Joseph Millson, Damsel ...... Jasmine Hyde. Producer: Gary Brown.

Afternoon Play 2 May 2000: Barnes and Molly
By Ray Brown. Love and mathematics combine in this true-life story of a secret romance between Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb, and his 17-year-old cousin...........when they met for the first time, in 1922, Barnes was 34 and Molly was 17. The story of their unsuitable liaison is told in their letters, which were discovered only after her father's beath, by Barnes' daughter, Mary Stopes-Roe. "The letters were in a cupboard in our old home, and they were in brown cardboard boxes which used to come from London shops. ... there were the letters, all in their own envelopes, all two hundred and sixty of them....."

Starring Samuel West, Emilia Fox and Mary Stopes-Roe. Producer: Pete Atkin.

The correspondence is also available as a book on Amazon:

Mathematics With Love: The Courtship Correspondence of Barnes Wallis, Inventor of the Bouncing Bomb (MacSci) Hardcover – December 23, 2004, by Mary Stopes-Roe, Barnes' daughter. Mary worked for many years at the University of Birmingham where she studied parent-child interactions with families of Asian and British ethnic origin. While archiving her family's papers after her father's death, she came across the letters he sent to Molly, and the ones she sent in reply.

Amazon blurb: In 1922 Barnes Wallis, who later invented the transatlantic airship and the bouncing bomb (seen in the movie The Dam Busters), fell in love for the first and last time - aged 35. The object of his affection, Molly Bloxam, was 17 and setting off to study science at University College London. Her father decreed that the two could correspond only if Barnes taught Molly mathematics in his letters.

Mathematics with Love presents, for the first time, the result of this curious diktat: a series of witty, tender and totally accessible introductions to calculus, trigonometry and electrostatic induction that remarkably, wooed and won the girl. Deftly narrated by Barnes and Molly's daughter Mary, Mathematics with Love is an evocative tale of a twenties courtship, a surprising insight into the early life of an engineering genius - and a great way to learn a little mathematics.