... Strange but seductive fare BY MOIRA PETTY There is nothing like a little bewilderment to make Saturday night go with a swing. Mark Ravenhili's Feed Me (R3, Saturday, November 18) resembled a party where the Martinis are a little too stiff; characters blur and you have trouble following conversations but the sensation is seductively moreish. The play, launching The Wire, a bold and ...

... Of bards, beaus and broadcasters David Pownall's artfully ingenious play, An Ephiphanous Use of the Microphone (R4. Friday, May 15). was both a sly dig at radio broadcasting and a celebration of it. In wittily drawn parallel scenes, the writer compared the pressures surrounding the BBC's first live broadcast of a Shakespeare play, on May 28, 1923, with the chi canery that accompanied its ...

... Something novel on air BY MOIRA PETTY Dramatic tension is the keynote of Patrick Hamilton's novels and the reason why works like Rope and Gaslight have made such effective translations to stage, screen and radio. The Classic Serial's evocative production of West Pier (R4, from Sunday, June 14), part of the 1953 Gorse Trilogy, was insidi ously creepy, as the respective veneers of innocence ...

... Fat humour thin on the ground By Moira Petty Pal is funny, OK? Or at least black comedy is often the interface between the psyche of the dieter and their attempts to keep afloat in a thin world. But with Fat Chance (R4. from Thursday. February 11) Jenny McDade missed the chance to say thing both funny and profound about an issue that goes far deeper than the dial on the bath room scales. ...

... Shake up for the millennium BY MOIRA PETTY As the millennium bandwagon rolls towards its premature climax, some pleasures are meted out more slowly. BBC Radio's Shakespeare for the Millennium season is a four-year project, bringing 17 productions both to the radio and retail outlets. although the puzzling habit of scooping yourself by selling the cassettes before they are broad cast continues. ...

... Saint loses out to Loretta BY MOIRA PETTY It is a little disturbing that I was most taken, in Saint Overboard (R4, from Monday, August 28), not with the figure of suave sleuth and safe-cracker, Simon Templar, but with his fleetingly featured girlfriend, Loretta Page. It was not that I disliked Paul Rhys' tation of Leslie Charteris' hero, indeed he suffused Templar's vowels and actions with ...

... A touching story of filial duty BY MOIRA PETTY Michael Mears is the Aiec Guinness of afternoon drama. Like Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets, Mears took every role in Stow Train to Woking (R4, Wednesday, July 5), like him, his touch was light with no shrill caricature. Mears was not merely the entire cast of this touching comedy about filial duty and how the parent/child relationship comes, ...

... Mystery is a weak tribute BY MORIA PEETY Anniversaries of eminent births, deaths and probably barmitzvahs, give the semblance of themed programming in radio drama. Recently we have had Harold Pinter's 70th, and no doubt the centenary of Oscar Wilde's death will launch a flotilla of events but. first, comes the 50th anniversary of the death of fellow Irishman GB Shaw. Quite what GBS would have ...

... Purposeful play but too many ideas BY MOIRA PETTY A growing army of tremulousvoiced mutants is invading radio drama if recent productions are anything to go by. There has been a growing tendency to cast adults as children where these roles are peripheral to the play. The result often sounds like something from an alien civilisation, me purpose ful adaptation of Penelope Lively's novel City ...

... Irish radio excellence For me, this year's radio drama highlight has not been any of the carefully circumscribed seasons but the outpounng of Irish writing. Irish radio plays have proved both revelational and entertaining. Now. in the First Bite season, which showcases new writers, comes another prodigiously tal ented Irish writer. Pearse Elliott, a 24-year-old civil servant, based The ...

... Bittersweet affair of the heart BY MOIRA PETTY Two major authors, writing nearly half a century apart, took adulterous love as the starting point for very different dissections of guilt, loyalty and faith. David Hare's Skylight (R3, Sunday, April 19), from the National Theatre, was a gripping, combative two hours. Kyra (Stella Gonet in a perfor mance of contained rage) had left her lover ...

... Family drama in full flight By Moira Petty I have not read Sebastian Faulks' acclaimed novel of life and love around the time of the Prst World War, but a riveting radio serialisation of BMsong (R4, from Monday, October 27) made me want to do so immediately. The dramatisation by Nick Stafford, with direction by Claire Grove, began by lightly delineat ing the French household into which a young ...