The Goalkeeper’s Guide To Absurdism
Wilkinson Productions
Directed by Carl Prekopp
Written by Paul Sirret

When Eric Cantona observed that seagulls follow trawlers because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea, it elevated French footballing philosophy into the upper pantheon of eclectic thought. So, in a broadcast about Albert Camus as goalkeeper philosopher you may have thought Cantona would have been referenced but instead the most meaningful quote was lifted from Bill Shankly - and didn’t give him a namecheck. Sacre Bleu!

That famous saying -Some people believe football is life or death - it's more important than that - will no doubt live on more in the memory than Camus’ appearances for the junior side of Racing Universitaire Algerios until illness at 17 forced premature retirement.

I myself first flirted with absurdism in the work of Ballard, with stories like Why I Want to F*** Ronald Reagan and The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motorcycle Race. His work seemed to embody both the bizarre and the profound, a clashing contrast to my grammar school classes teaching the theology of Aquinas and Kant’s assertion that space and time are merely forms of intuition.

In time, of course, I discovered that sometimes being absurd, or simply preposterous, did not necessarily mask an underlying truth about humanity's place in the universe.

It was around the same time I discovered the existentialists like Albert Camus, and with a few close friends retreated into a world of intense discussions about the ontological argument for the existence of God and logical positivism while spaced out on Special Brew. In the background Canadian rock band Rush waxed lyrical about black holes and elves.

If absurdism is the touchstone of this broadcast, perhaps it could have been titled Camus And The Contemplation of Shinpads.

The premise of this rambling monologue fronted by Arthur Darvil is an examination of the juxtaposition between goalkeeping and philosophy, with Camus free to let his mind interrogate Cartesian dualism and Kierkegaardian despair while between the sticks.

The musings include mentioning lots of towering thinkers — Nietzsche, Kant, Locke, Heidegger. Kierkegaard would say football is trivial, but Camus would counter that it is beautiful because it has joy, freedom, meaning. In a universe with no obligation to supply either, we create meaning from football.

Somewhere in there the opposing centre-forward is solemnly declared the Minotaur — a genuinely good absurdist image that could have been embroidered as Darvil droned on.

The frustrating thing is that there was a genuinely sharp idea buried under all this borrowed weight, and Cantona has already been identified. He once said he saw no difference between a great pass and the poetry of Rimbaud. If you want a footballer as an accidental existentialist, he's sitting right there,and of course was subject to a film by the social commentator par excellence Ken Loach.

Camus’ last game before tuberculosis claimed his fledgling career ends, with our narrator wondering whether he is mind or body, having already declared that everything good is God — , worked out mid-save, with the score presumably still level. Is it philosophy, poetry or parody? You, the listener, decide.

The Odyssey
Homer
Adapted by Simon Armitage

The BBC has digitally dusted off Simon Armitage’s Odyssey to ride the wave of interest stirred up by Christopher Nolan’s new film. They make for a fascinating double bill, not because they tell different stories, but because they offer utterly different experiences.

Watching Nolan’s version — leather seat, swivel table, screen the size of a village hall, sound like a thunderstorm inside a shipping container — feels like being ringside at a bare-knuckle bout. It’s muscular, relentless, and determined to keep your pulse rate somewhere near tachycardia. Armitage’s radio adaptation, by contrast, is all nuance and slow burn: a story that settles around you rather than assaults you.

And then there is the casting for on the big screen there is Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as Penelope; but the Hollywood ‘A’ listers are easily dwarfed by the BBC production with Tim McInerny, Benedict Cumberbatch, Janet Mcteer and a host of others. They literally don’t make them like this any more.

But there is another gulf. Nolan’s film omits one of the great pleasures of mid-century myth adaptations: the philosophical sparring between gods and mortals. The Myth movies of the 1950s and 60s adored those scenes — Zeus leaning on a cloud, Hera sharpening her nails with a grievance but Nolan ventures nowhere near Mount Olympus. Armitage does. His gods are chatty, reflective, occasionally pompous, and very much interested in the nature of humankind.

One talking point doing the rounds concerning the movie is the casting of Helen of Troy as a Black woman — interpreted by some as a political gesture. I’ve no quarrel with the choice, though this particular Helen had a face that wouldn’t launch a lifeboat, let alone a thousand ships.

Listening to the radio version hours after viewing after the film was almost medicinal. No popcorn avalanches being shovelled into open gullets, no cola evaporating by the litre. Just a quiet room, a pair of earphones, and a story that washes over you like Calypso’s whisper rather than the shriek of Sirens. It’s remarkable how the same myth can feel like two entirely different art forms: one a spectacle, the other a lullaby.

Bettaney
A perfectly Normal production for Radio 4

Michael Bettaney, the bête noire of the British security services. So reviled was the MI5 officer turned traitor that certain elements of the IRA’s diminishing hardliners now regard him as a kind of anti hero.

Written by former intelligence officer Rosa McPhillips, it carries the weight of insider knowledge — but also the accusation, from Jack Conrad, an associate of Bettaney’s, that it is spinning a propaganda tale on behalf of the State.

Still, all good fun, especially when a target of Bettaney’s was in a car chase and the young female Special Branch agent in the passenger seat squeaks to the driver, “Step on it, Smudge”.

The kernel of this aspect of the story takes place behind bars, where Bettaney — a late convert to Marxism — was placed after making overtures to the Soviets. They weren’t interested, but another British source, Stakeknife, was made aware of the contact and passed it on to his handler.

Bettaney received an 18-year term, but in a moment of brilliant British bureaucracy he was housed with IRA top man, Brian Keenan. Chaos ensued, and an embittered Bettaney is alleged to have ratted out numerous informers who were then dispatched.

A commentary is tagged on the end and provided by BBC security journalist Gordon Carrera but the truth, as ever, depends on your perspective I guess.

The Master Builder
Henrik Ibsen
Adapted by David Hare

Another salute to the BBC full cast glory days, The Master Builder, and it’s worth saying at the outset what it isn’t. This is not one of the Corporation’s periodic “reimaginings”, the sort that had me sharpening the cutlery over their Last of the Mohicans debacle, where Hawkeye’s masculinity was quietly taken out behind the woodshed. Here, Ibsen is left to be Ibsen. Whatever reservations one might have about the production, tampering with the text isn’t among them.

As radio drama, it’s competent rather than compelling. The pacing holds, the cast do what they can, but this is a metaphysical, symbolic play — and symbolism doesn’t always thrive in a medium with no faces, no physical space, nothing but voices suspended in air. There are moments that land, but others drift into abstraction without visual anchors.

The production can’t quite reache the interpretive frame the play quietly demands. Over the years, directors and academics have wrestled with the meaning of The Master Builder, often producing ingenious theories. But Ibsen left a key in plain sight, and it’s mythological.

The title points directly to Norse myth. When Asgard was built, a master builder was summoned to raise a wall around the gods’ dwelling. In Greek myth, Daedalus constructed the labyrinth to contain the Minotaur, assisted by his son Icarus — who flew too close to the sun and fell. Solness builds his own castles in the air and meets the same fate. “Sol” is the Norwegian word for sun; Ibsen wasn’t being coy.

The names complete the cipher. Solness’s young rival is Ragnar — a nod to Ragnarök, the end of days when the old gods fall and a new order rises. Ragnar is that new order. Hilde Wangel, the former schoolchild turned vixen,shares her name with a Valkyrie, the maidens who carry fallen heroes to Valhalla, and her surname suggests a harbinger, an angel of death. Once you use this key, the play’s themes resolve: death, destruction, renewal; the old order giving way to the new; the hubris of men who build too high.

I offer this not as academic embroidery but because it’s the frame this production never quite adopts. Without it, the play’s mystical undertones can feel like fog rather than architecture.

The BBC’s own billing leans on the MeToo resonance — Hilde arriving to collect on a promise Solness supposedly made when she was thirteen. Five years ago that might have felt like a topical hook but the underlying discomfort remains. A middle-aged man making overtures to a thirteen-year-old is timelessly troubling, mythological framing or no framing. The production acknowledges the unease but doesn’t sit with it for long, preferring to let the moment drift into the play’s general mysticism.

The Master Builder is another reminder, like The Odyssey, that the BBC has a rich history of tackling works of importance.

@Turnbullissimo



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