Radio Plays, 2025
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Harry Turnbull's Reviews
The future of long form radio drama
The War With The Newts
A Reduced Listening Production for Radio 3
It must be an appropriate opportunity to ask whether extended works like this will have a home once Drama on 3 gets the chop.
The BBC’s decision raises urgent questions about the future of long-form radio drama. Once this cherished slot disappears, where will Shakespeare, Greek tragedies, experimental works, or modern 90-minute-plus plays find a home given the corporation’s relentless pivot toward younger audiences and bite-sized podcasting?
The official statement offered little reassurance. The BBC claims it is "looking at ways to increase the number of longer plays to maintain the range of creative opportunities within our audio drama offer." But if there were a coherent plan, why announce the closure first? Surely the sensible approach would be to establish a clear alternative before pulling the plug? This "announce first, figure it out later" approach smacks of autonomy and of ignoring the wishes of the audience.
We’ve heard the same vague platitudes before—about being "champions of audio"—but actions speak louder than words. And actions like this one suggest the opposite.
Let’s not forget the curious justification that "audience feedback" shows listeners favour classical music on Radio 3. Of course they do—it’s a classical music station. But that doesn’t negate the importance of having a space for extended dramatic works. Radio drama isn’t just a niche interest; it’s part of a rich cultural tradition that requires time, depth, and space to breathe—qualities that don’t fit neatly into the BBC’s current strategy.
What’s especially galling is the secrecy surrounding this decision. There was no meaningful engagement with audiences or the wider industry, just another drip-feed announcement that erodes trust and a claim that they have feedback. No doubt via one or other marketing agency. Long-form drama demands commitment, both from its creators and its listeners. The BBC’s inability to make that same commitment is not just disappointing; it’s a betrayal of its role as a public service broadcaster.
Turning to War With The Newts, this may well fit into the experimental category. Based on a work by Czech visionary Karel Capek, it imagines a world in which newts emerge as an industrial threat to mankind. Yes, I know it sounds nuts.
The story critiques human greed, exploitation, and self-destruction, a pre-cursor to Orwell's Animal Farm. In this modern adaptation by Ed Harris, updated techniques like poetic narration and news excerpts explore the story’s themes, though the fragmented style can be confusing without familiarity with the original novel. The work raises questions that resonate with modern capitalist society, including whether humanity itself is worth saving.
Purple Heart Warriors
A podcast by Catherine Bailey Productions for the BBC World Service
America's WWII narrative is often defined by two cataclysmic events involving Japan—Pearl Harbour, the catalyst for U.S. involvement, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which marked its devastating conclusion. Behind these events lies another story, this one involving Japanese-Americans and Hawaiians who fought for the United States.
It is a discordant tale of displacement, loyalty, and moral uncertainty, one that the BBC World Service seeks to illuminate in its dramatic reconstruction. This programme focuses on the men and women who, despite being viewed with suspicion by their adopted nation, took up arms against the land of their ancestry, earning both medals and a conflicted legacy.
What remains underexplored in this broadcast however, is the deeper psychological battle these soldiers must have faced: the tension between heart and mind, cultural identity and national duty. While the narrative references the 442nd Regimental Combat Team’s deployment to Europe, it skirts the emotional complexity of their exclusion from the Pacific theatre—a conflict that must have been painful for many.
The story is narrated by Will Sharpe with the lead character Ken Morioka played by Akie Kotaba and uses time travel to place him in his grandfather's army boots in 1943. An unusual device rather than, say, a more conventional storytelling method like finding a diary. From training camp the regiment travel to Europe for combat operations and over six episodes screenwriter Irish Yamashita uses this lens to follow Ken and his compatriots.
The backdrop is an understated soundscape with ambient music effects recalling the period as well as utilising sounds from Japanese theatre. Ultimately it succeeds in shedding light on a little-known yet significant slice of history. During service the immigrant cohort were awarded 4,000 Purple Hearts.
At the end there is a slice of propaganda as Ken is catapulted forward in time but not to 2024, it is 2029 and a wave of anti immigrant laws are in force reflecting I guess the problems the Japanese-Americans faced during and after the war.
For some reason, possibly BBC edicts, they insist on adding trigger warnings before each episode in case an aural story about war contains battle scenes.
Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford
An Allegra production for BBC Radio 4
Christmas Pudding is a frothy escapade of Bright Young Things between the wars of the 20th century. Unfortunately, this early effort by Mitford sounds more like a turkey than a tasty treat.
Best known for later successes like Love in a Cold Climate, Mitford herself admitted that she started writing just to fund her travels to the South of France. In Christmas Pudding, she is clearly still finding her voice. The novel focuses more on quirky characters and aristocratic settings than on plot, featuring figures like Paul Fotheringay (inspired by John Betjeman) and Annabel Fortescue, a former call girl turned commentator on love and marriage. While there are flashes of sharp satire, the humour feels thin, the tone overly frivolous, and the escapism fails to captivate.
Listening felt like trudging through a festive caper that promised brilliance but delivered little as BBC Classic Serial analyser John Yorke said as much in his introduction.
Although it wasn’t entirely amusing I did find a BBC summary of the broadcast that was actually laugh-out-loud.
“Christmas Pudding is a wonderful comedy of bad manners in which the carefully measured ingredients of disguised suitors, amorous rivalry, unsuitable liaisons and comic misunderstandings, are cooked into a delicious festive treat, topped like a generous spoonful of burning brandy and by the glowing brilliance of Mitford’s comic dialogue.”
Dare I suggest that A.I may have been utilised for this ludicrously over-the-top assessment?!
The Concierge
A BBC Audio Wales production
What happens when an ordinary former Whitehall adviser is pulled into the shadowy world of Russian oligarchs, Ukrainian refugees, and Westminster power plays? Welcome to The Concierge, a gripping three-part thriller where money, murder, and political intrigue collide. Written by Simon Scardifield and Andrew Day, this series thrusts Joe (Sean Delaney) into extraordinary circumstances that spiral out of control—with fatal consequences and a dramatic fall from a balcony. But who—or what—is The Concierge is a question that still puzzles me. That mystery lingers in this fast-paced drama drawing on London's tangled ties with Russian wealth and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
Finist The Bright Falcon
BBC Studios Audio production
Russia rears its head again. When Russian women left their homeland to marry ISIS fighters, many faced trial when they returned home. But as this docu-drama shows, even those retelling their stories can be in danger. Playwright Svetlana Petriychuk and director Zhenya Berkovich were sentenced to six years in a penal colony in 2024 for producing a play deemed by authorities to justify terrorism. Their case starkly illustrates the risks of artistic expression under a regime where Stalinism’s shadow lingers.
This radio adaptation draws on their award-winning Moscow play, which explores the motivations of women who left Russia, comparing Russian men—‘wet as tumbleweed’—to the valorized Islamic fighters. Titled after a Russian fairytale about a falcon transforming into a prince, the story delves into the yearning for something better and the price of those choices.
The drama resonates far beyond Russia. Imagine a play about the State injustices visited upon Shemima Begum that challenges official narratives—how far would our own government go to silence it? This powerful work forces us to question the limits of free speech and the courage of those who dare to push them.
Bright Day by JB Priestley
A Radio4 Extra Reprise
I’ve often wondered why this book never makes the top 100 novels of the 20th century but I guess I’m not in step with the cognoscenti. I assumed this was the beguiling BBC dramatisation by Diana Griffiths, one time partner of Priestley's fellow Yorkshireman Stan Barstow, but it turned out to be an earlier version from 1984.
This one is divided into six episodes rather than the two hour long episodes we associate with classic adaptations but obviously follows the same trajectory.
Gregory Dawson is a Hollywood screenwriter looking back on his youth in Bruddersford, a hybrid of two well known Yorkshire towns.
Whilst writing a script in a Cornish hotel he bumps into two figures from his past and from there unfurls a captivating story told in flashback about his associations with the Allington family.
Eric Pringle’s script and the sound effects vividly reflects the jollity and then-looming black clouds of pre Great War Britain.
@Turnbullissimo 25 Jan 25
