TREVOR HOYLE RADIO PLAYS

Trevor Hoyle presented the arts and entertainments programme "What's On" for Granada TV before becoming a full-time writer.

He won the Radio Times Drama Award with his first play GIGO. The actor in the title role of his play RANDLE'S SCANDALS won the Sony Award.

He has published fiction with John Calder - THE MAN WHO TRAVELLED ON MOTORWAYS, VAIL, BLIND NEEDLE - and also THE LAST GASP, which was a Doubleday Book Club Selection in the US and is now under option in Hollywood.

His novel MIRRORMAN was published in 1999, and in June 2003 his novel RULE OF NIGHT, first published in 1975, was reissued by Pomona Books

"a powerfully authentic account of working-class life and gang violence" Time Out.

Currently he is working on a novel The Kingdom of Darkness and compiling a collection of short stories - Hard Shoulders/Soft Verges for Calder Publications.

His own website is at

www.trevorhoyle.com

UPDATE, Dec 09......Trevor Hoyle's new novel, "Down the Figure 7", set in a northern cotton town in the 50s, is out anytime now. ISBN is 9781904590255; publisher Pomona.

BBC BROADCASTS: RADIO PLAYS
10.10.91 Gigo
31.10.91 Conflagration
29.11.93 Randle's Scandals; rpt. BBC7, 8 Jul 07
16.07.05 Haunted Hospital

NOTES ON THE PLAYS

GIGO [60 minutes]
Winner of the Radio Times Drama Award, this comedy-drama stars Alun Armstrong as a man whose obsession with acausal connections - lunar eclipses, the meaning of time - starts to take over his life. Is he living in a quantum dream or is the dream living him?
Radio 4...... 10/10/91
Winner of Radio Times Drama Award for best play
NDR Hamburg April 92

CONFLAGRATION [60 minutes]
Set at the end of World War II, eleven-year old Danny's favourite uncle returns from service with the Desert Rats just in time for Bonfire night - and to help the lads protect their wood from the raiding Ramsay Street Gang.

Radio 4...... 31/10/91

RANDLE'S SCANDALS [90 minutes]
After colliding with a Blackpool tram in his Lagonda, Wigan's famous rude comedian Frank Randle is admitted to hospital in Rochdale for psychiatric observation. The play traces Randle's helter-skelter career and tragic end due to drink and TB -- for which Keith Clifford won the Sony Award for best actor in the title role.
Radio 4...... 28/11/93

This play was repeated in July 2007 on BBC7 to mark the 50th anniversary of Frank Randle's death. It was very well-received. Here are two comments from the BBC7 messageboard:

......I enjoyed yesterday's play about Randle, who has just had a blue plaque put up on Blackpool's North pier to commemorate his death fifty years ago. Keith Clifford, who played Randle brilliantly, deserving his Best Actor Sony Award, recently left "Last Of The Summer Wine". Another cast member, Jean Ferguson (Marina) portrayed the late comedienne Hylda Baker in her radio play "She Knows Y'Know" in 1997. Baker wasn't very popular in the business and very few people attended her funeral. Maybe the play tells why.

Any chance of hearing it on BBC7 ?

Another listener replied:

......I too thought the Randle play very well done. A name so very famous then but so little known today. He was featured in a radio documentary by Mark Radcliffe recently. Hylda Baker suffered from dementia in her final years and believed she was Nellie Pledge, her character from the Nearest and Dearest tv series. I know that she and co-star Jimmy Jewel loathed each other. A Baker radio play would be most welcome.

HAUNTED HOSPITAL....2005
Radio Times Choice: "Strange things have been going on at an old hospital in Rochdale for years. There's the spectral sound of a baby crying in the night when all the wards are shut, and sightings of a small, thin, round-shouldered man who wanders along the main corridor at all hours, accompanied by a mongrel. If ghost stories are your thing then look no further than this new play by Trevor Hoyle in which a perplexed woman from our century finds her destiny entwined with a destitute young girl from Victorian times."

Trevor Hoyle's ghost story, set in a hospital in Rochdale, is driven by two parallel storylines. One is contemporary while the other is set in the late 1800s and draws on real events that took place in the Dearnley Union Workhouse. Producer/Director: Liz Leonard.
Radio 4...... 16/07/05; repeated 05/05/07

I received an interesting message about the broadcast:

....I have heard the play by Trevor Hoyle set in Dearnley hospital in Rochdale. My great grandmother was born in Marland workhouse (which was replaced by Dearnley) and I have often speculated on the circumstances of her birth in 1856. My own inquiries have been fruitless; it seems that the records for Marland are no longer available.

Mrs. P.S, Blaby, Leicestershire, 5 May 07.

Nigel Deacon / Diversity website.

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