... Coombes) were forced to look back when their grandson came to stay and wanted to know what life would have been like for a Second World War poet and soldier he was studying. This was more formulaic, with the guilt and pain the grandfather had felt over the ...

... February 18) adapted from Len Deighton's novel, was stretched through a day to bedtime, mimicking the real hours at which a Second World War bomber crew prepared and then carried out a devastat ing German raid. This gave an uncanny tension and reality to the ...

... Saturday, May 3), dramatised by Diana Griffiths. Olivier Pearce played the 11-year-old boy facing life on the cusp of the Second World War while his own small world was changing forever. His mother's illness (Gillian Bevan) and the infidelity of his father ...

... teenagers being catapulted into the harshness of the adult world was dramatised by Judy Allen. Set in India, just after the Second World War, the play had a languorous tone until a tragic death brought the spiritual issues under discussion into sharp focus. ...

... out-to-lunch Siegfried on sack, who rises superbly to the comic challenge. Julia Stoneham's enjoyably soapy saga of Second World War land girls. The Cinderella Service (R4, from Wednesday, April 5) was like The Archers meets Tenko, with a clutch of young ...

... was to become the modem computer, and who was speaking from the Bletchley Park decoding centre towards the end of the Second World War. There were references to Shakespeare, rewritten to fit the new age Puck's girdle around the world was one of fibre optic ...

... follicular theory. This crime was sickly enough, reflecting what was meted out on the streets of Northern Ireland and Second World War France, for what followed to be credible. But its inherent triviality gave Duarte the opportunity to lam poon the essentially ...

... 4) may lack intellectual pretension but the story is a classic compound of romance and drama. This adaptation of the Second World War saga by Moya O'Shea was highly enjoy able, with its three hour running time over six episodes allowing the space for ...

... the former being inspired by the injustice he felt had been done to the latter, over his Nazi broadcasts during the Second World War. Plum's War (Fiction Factory for R4, Wednesday, July 7), by Michael Butt, intriguingly examined not just how Wodehouse ...

... backgrounds (Julian Rhind Tutt and Samuel West) who were united by musical ambition and ethics. Set in the pre- and early Second World War years, it saw one of the men interned as a conscientious objector. This was no orthodox narra tive. Characters set the ...