... Big Jim and the Figaro Club RADIO 4 RADIO 4'S brand new comedy tells of the adventures of a gang of builder's labourers and is based on the characters created in the 1982 TV series of the same name. It goes back in time to the forming of the Figaro Club just after the war when Big Jim, the natural leader of the pack, played by Norman Rossington, tells those who don't know how it all started ...

... Cliffhanger BBC RADIO 4 THIS IS the second series (Saturdays, 11.30 to midnight) of the Cliffhanger Theatre Company in which the cast of four write and perform spoof versions of well-known cinema films. Robin Driscoll, Peter McCarthy, Tony Haase, and Rebecca Stevens are the guilty parties and began with a two-parter about The Dog Who Ran For President. The programme is topically amusing rather ...

... 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 ...

... Christmas is better on the air Iiv MOIItA PETTY OK, SO I'm biased, but I think radio does Christmas so much better than television. The 12 days of Christmas seem more like the 1200 while festive television, with all those Christmas specials filmed in the summer, washes over you. And attaching the tag 1 V pre miere' to a film doesn't make it any better than the first time you saw it at the ...

... RADIO Recordings of Sir Seymour Hicks, Marie Tempest and Gertie Millar will be heard in Through the Stage Door on May 10. In the programme, Philip Treleaven will introduce three backstage personalities who will remind listeners of some of the great actors and actresses they have known. First is Valentine Bragginton, nearly 80 years old, and a stage doorkeeper at the Savoy. He re members ...

... 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 ...

... 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 ...

... 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, ...

... Great fun to be had from Pontac's parodies by MOIRA PETTY THE TWO best radio comedies of recent weeks, both parodies of great works, have come from the same pen, that of the excoriatingly witty Perry Pontac. His Prince Lear (R3, Friday, November 18) was a miniaturised prequel to the rather more famous King Lear, artfully composed in the Stratford house style with fluent blank verse, flowery ...

... Complex maelstrom of motives By MOIRA PETTY Drama with a strong ethnic or regional flavour fares well on radio, its sense of its own roots giving it a purposefulness. The season of new American playwriting, broadcast under the banner New Found Land has been extraordinarily good, not least because of its breadth of interpretation of the American experience. Nearer to home, Ireland has been ...

... Gripping Cotswold caper Peter Tinniswood has become a magical name in radio drama, but wtien expectations are high, so are the stakes. The House Swap, (R4, Saturday, February 6) was a jewel, an assemblage of robust cynicism, delicate insights, and dialogue that was natural but never mundane. In other hands, his tale of the spectral presence of a gnarled old man who brings understanding to a ...

... China old and new- a symbolic snoop BY MOIRA PETTY Gangster gunfire vying with the bars of Andrew Lioyd Webber musicals on opening night; corpses in hi-tech trainers, a manic glint in their dead eyes. These were some of the symbols of the New China as depicted in the 'colour' pieces of Shanghai journalist Lin Jun in John Fletcher's absorbing play DeadHne (R4, Thursday. October 16). Ordered ...