... The Doctor lives again By MOIRA PETTY IN A wet and variable summer which somehow sums up the mood of the decade, radio has been looking back at long, hot summers when passions flared as well as the trousers and people had ideals they thought were worth fighting for. The best was The Monday Play Chicago Conspiracy Trial (R4; Monday August 23) which, in a riveting two hours, caught the whole ...

... Hoping for peace in Playland By MOIRA PETTY ATHOL Fugard's great achievement in Playland, (R3; Sunday, September 12), receiving its radio premiere, is to tell us something specific about contemporary South Africa through the medium of two men who are brought to life in the most gripping way. And yet this pair a black nightwatchman and an Afrikaaner, now returned to civilian life but still ...

... Listening to Trollope in a new light By MOIRA PETTY MOST great men have their secret pleasures. John Major reads Trollope. Emerging, blinking, from the closet on Desert Island Discs he chose The Small House at Allington as the book to accompany him on a sojourn awav from the front benches. Lo and behold. the very same is the subject of the Classic Serial (R4; from Sunday, September 19). Did ...

... A nod's as good as a wink when you're on the radio By MOIRA PETTY THERE is refinement of face and bearing about Bill Nighy which, in a visual medium, might not have found him cast as a coarse Irish small-time villain with a compulsion about his bodily functions. As Sean Bourke, the criminal who unexpectedly found fame when he sprung George Blake from prison, he was magnificently pitted against ...

... Just taste the full flavour of the classics By MOIRA PETTY THERE hasn't been such a sense of people interned in a place to which they are drawn with the instinct of migrating birds since the ill-fated Eldorado. The claustrophobia of the country house by the lake was palpable in The Monday Play's production of The Seagull (R4 Monday November 1); you could almost hear the cast breathing down ...

... By MOIRA PETTY Alrawi delightfully turned navel-gazing to comic effect. David Threlfall played the writer, with Desmond Barrit as the Genie, a combination of alternative narrator, conscience and muse, in a heightened account of Alrawi's own absurdist experiences when trying to get his play past the Egyptian censor. He came up against the standard bearers of Egyptian moral life who waved red ...

... All the anguish of the artistic struggle BY MORIA PETTY THE WAY the poor artist has to suffer to express himself is a recurrent theme of an; particularly, perhaps, in radio drama, a medium which seems to encourage the writer's primal scream of anguish. While Slawomir Mrozek's original play for radio, as part of the BBC's Polish festival Polska! Sunday Play The Slaughterhouse (R3; Sunday ...

... There's no sinking the Radio 5 ship By MOIRA PETTY LIKE the orchestra playing as the ship goes down, Radio 5 is coming into its own with drama serials. Is this a bid by the doomed station, already the market leader in children's drama, to prove how indispensable it is? Or is it by way of a treat for those handful of listeners clinging to the rails before it goes to its death on March 27? Radio ...

... Johnson's opium for the people DR JOHNSON is one of those figures who seems to have penetrated the psyche of the nation. Just recently, though, he has seemed to be even more in vogue, being portrayed by, amongst others, Billy Connolly and Robbie Coltrane. Now, in the Studio 3 slot, Snoo Wilson has given us, in Poonsh, (R3; Saturday, January 22) his first original play for radio which takes ...

... Tuning into the spirit of radio By MOIRA PETTY TELEVISION seems increasingly to be jettisoning the spiritual in favour of the corporeal. On ITV, Sunday nights are marked not by hymns from a far-flung cathedral but something thought more appropriate for families, films like the pugilistic Karate Kid. Even on the BBC, there is a sense of religion being allowed out of the box only on ...

... By MOIRA PETTY Today, but Blair is a good news-only man so we were swiftly on to its next incarnation as a nightclub. Along came another man of vision Peter Stringfellow. \jaaiy, amongst all tnese snowoiz luminaries ana men oi vision, some oi them still alive, there were no personal recollections, merely Blair's rather excitable commentary. In nearly 1 00 years there must have been many a ...

... Thirties Depression drama still has resonance in the nineties By MOIRA PETTY CAN the kind of dramatic writing which has particular resonances for the time in which it was conceived continue to grip audiences from another era? Radio 3's current Thirties Season prompts such a thought. The answer must be yes, if the first play in its pro gramme, Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty (R3, Sunday, ...