R4 Drama 2026
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Harry Turnbull's Reviews, August 2026
The Goalkeeeper’s Guide To Absurdism
Wilkinson Productions
Directed by Carl Prekopp
Written by Paul Sirret
When Eric Canton 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.
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Harry Turnbull's Reviews, April 2026
Flight
Originally written by Walter White
Adapted and directed for BBC Radio 4 by Adura Onashile.
Art succeeds in a number of ways, including when it holds up a mirror to the your own life. It recounts the experience of Mimi Daquin, a light-skinned Creole woman in the early 20th century who "passes" as white.
What makes Flight so profound is its nuance. It avoids the broad strokes of modern issue-based drama and instead focuses on the agonizing internal cost of identity. Listening to Mimi’s struggle with skin tone and heritage offered a level of insight that I re-examined in hindsight in relation to two relationships, in a way that only true authenticity can provide.
Her journey both personal and in the narrative arc of the story involves external and internal conflict which finally resolved with self realisation.
What also lifts this production is its sound. Harmony Rose-Bremner’s narration carries a quiet intensity, as if Mimi is forever holding herself in check, and when that composure slips — just slightly — it’s devastating.
Threaded through the drama is a line of Black music that works less as accompaniment and more as memory: a pulse from the world Mimi has tried to leave behind. The soundscape evokes each setting with precision — the simmering tension of Atlanta, the bustle of Harlem, the polished hush of New York — giving the story a physicality that makes Mimi’s internal conflict feel painfully present.
400 Strangers
An Almost Tangible production
If Flight is a robust, well-crafted story of human experience, 400 Strangers is more like an elongated tabloid headline. Dealing with the housing of asylum seekers in an East Midlands community, this 90-minute drama focuses on stereotypes like white thugs, the virtuous sympathiser and a personable, caring refugee.
We see neighbourhood vigilante patrols and the usual chat about race bigotry. This stuff goes on of course but it still feels somewhat lazy, a superficial trawl over a story that was bound to be commissioned at some stage.
I see it as a missed opportunity. There was a better way forward, imagine a script that ditched the polarizing tropes and focused instead, for instance, on two mothers: an asylum seeker’s mum left behind in a faraway land, and a local mother whose daughter has been attacked. A story arc that brought those two perspectives together would have offered actual insight rather than the usual us vs. them narrative.
There is a vital lesson here for BBC commissioners: the most powerful way to explore race, identity, and history is to let the story speak for itself. Flight succeeds because it trusts the listener to understand the tragedy of a hidden heritage. 400 Strangers fails because it insists on force-feeding us points we’ve already heard a thousand times.
Celia’s Secret
A Jarvis & Ayres production
While we are constantly bombarded with "fake news" and grim warnings about digital romance fraud, Jarvis & Ayres’ production of Celia’s Secret reminds us of the good old-fashioned hoax. It is a lighter, far more benevolent affair, though it offers a timely warning about how easily we are duped when we want to believe.
I say this with some humility. I usually scoff at those who fall for outrageous scams, convinced that the warning signs are too obvious to miss. However, just days before this aired, a trivial refund enquiry to Matalan on Twitter saw me nearly hand over my life to a clone account in India. I only realized what a complete dunce I was being as I attempted to upload my driving license for the third time and the guy I was talking to on Whatsapp began to get rather agitated.
If it can happen to a skeptic over a clothing refund, imagine the levers that can be pulled on a less discerning mind.
Celia’s Secret explores a real-life prank played on the writer Michael Frayn. While his play Copenhagen (concerning the wartime meeting of physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg) was being staged, an actor decided to indulge in a massive hoodwink. In the original story, German physicists were held in an English manor house post-war to see if they’d spill secrets about how near Adolf was to creating a nuclear bomb.
The trick involved a letter from a woman claiming to have found handwritten documents under the floorboards of that very manor house. Frayn was completely reeled in—not because the evidence was foolproof, but because the story was so tantalizing. Instead of nuclear secrets, the documents described the construction of a table tennis table.
Starring Roger Allam and Alex Jennings, this production is a delightful reminder that we are all, at heart, amenable to a tall story. Whether it’s a playwright looking for a lost chapter of history or a critic looking for a refund, we see what we want to see.
The Archers Podcast
Recently I was investigating the trail of a notorious terrorist who has vanished thanks to the National Archives refusing to release the relevant files, citing Section 38 of the Freedom of Information Act and data protection. It was akin to extracting information from the BBC about The Archers, I discovered.
When Kirsty Allsopp appeared on The Archers Podcast many listeners were intrigued as she tried to estimate the value of Home Farm, a manor house once owned by the Aldridge family and now recently changed hands. In Ambridge however, all is not what it seems when it comes to property valuations – they are strictly verboten. Kirsty was forced to scour Google looking for a comparison and estimated the house could be worth beween £1.5 and £2.5m – some acute perspicacity there Kirsty.
Why is this policy that goes against the national obsession of chatting property so prominent?
First I tried the Archers podcast team, who unlike many BBC departments, openly show their email address. No response. Ah well, what about their Whatsapp number? Ditto. BBC press office? Two emails and a phone call. Sweet silence. Editor Jeremy Howe? Far too busy to answer emails. Then a message did drop from the press office: ‘We won't be offering a comment on this I'm afraid.’ A policy of refusing to name house prices resembling a State cover up.
@Turnbullissimo
Harry Turnbull's Reviews, January 2026
The Last of the Mohicans (BBC Radio 4), 29 Dec 25 & 4Jan 26
It's strangely discordant when a classic adventure story opens with a discussion about whether an American Indian should be referred to as a creature or called by his name, Magua. Minutes later a 'paleskinned man' comes into view which I guess is a polite step back from being a paleface.
Yes it's The Last of the Mohicans, but not as we know it.
The BBC commissioned a reinterpretation on the 200th anniversary of this tale of the Wild Frontier and they clearly laid down some very specific parameters. Out goes tension, danger and pursuit and in comes lectures about Colonial oppression, environmental stewardship and the nobility of the humanitarian native.
Personally I'd prefer the snap of twigs underfoot, breathless flight, the crack of gunfire. James Fenimore Cooper's novel, for all its flaws, throws vulnerable travellers into hostile territory during wartime, establishing stakes and momentum from the outset.
So what is going on here? The BBC's own press release gives the game away: according to the Corporation the novel is "widely discredited" and rarely read today because of its "melodramatic stereotyping" and "historical inaccuracy."
Some of this is fair. It's right to note that the Mohicans weren't dying out as the story implies and their descendants are very much alive today. It's valid to elevate the female character Cora from bystander to a more central role. And Cooper's conflation of distinct tribes deserved correction. The story itself is straightforward enough: two sisters travelling to their father's fort during the French and Indian War, guided by a treacherous Huron named Magua, must be rescued by Hawkeye—a white frontiersman raised by Mohicans—and his Native companions. It's a tale of pursuit, betrayal and frontier violence.
Native American Bradley Lewis as Magua, Jay Rincon of Mexican descent as Uncas, and mixed heritage British actor Leonnie Elliott as Cora do their best, but they're handicapped by stilted dialogue and a lack of momentum.
It’s more like a lecture with sound effects than drama. As expert John Yorke observed in Radio 4's Opening Lines programme introducing the broadcast, the novel has been "praised, ridiculed, loved, despised and cancelled but never forgotten." Yorke, former BBC Controller of Drama Production, takes a measured view: Cooper tried to capture frontier realities and often demonstrated admiration for Native Americans. The book embodies fundamental questions about American identity—race, culture, belonging.
Views have long diverged—Cooper was ridiculed by Mark Twain but lionised by D.H. Lawrence. As radio historian Professor Tim Crook observes, recent decades have seen adaptations retold through the imperatives of contemporary relevance, often assuming audiences no longer know the original text. When correction overtakes storytelling, something essential is lost.
This adaptation doesn't engage with complexity. It simply reverses the moral poles: colonials bad, Native people good. That's not critical revision—it's replacement mythology.
The dramatic casualties are severe. Hawkeye—a white man adopted by a Native tribe—is sidelined almost to irrelevance. Here was a character caught between cultures, loyalties and identities: messy, problematic, but dramatically rich. Perfect for exploring the contradictions at the heart of the frontier myth. Instead, he's neutered to make room for a romance between Cora and Uncas, some of which unfolds, bafflingly, on the astral plane.
Were indigenous peoples really humanitarian tree-huggers averse to scalping? The BBC consulted extensively with Native academics and creatives—so why not commission them to create original drama, or a documentary exploring the novel's contested legacy? Why hollow out Cooper's work from within?
The production company, Thomas Carter Productions, was no doubt tied to a very specific brief. But this adaptation, for all its good intentions, smooths away the very tensions that make the material compelling. Drama should make us feel the conflict, not explain it. Instead, we get something respectful, well-intentioned, and dramatically inert—a compliance exercise masquerading as frontier adventure.
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