... Fishing drama is a prize catch BY MOIRA PETTY The Wire, Radio 3's series of new plays by controversial writers, came up trumps with Richard Bean's Unsinkable (R3, Saturday, December 2), a gritty drama of the hard lives of Hull trawlermen and their families in the sixties. It made the cheesy efforts of Hollywood's fishermen epic, The Perfect Storm, look tawdry by comparison. Unsinkable may ...

... Dramatic pictures that touch the heart to its very depth BY MOIRA PETTY Radio is the most intimate of mediums but it is only rarely that a broadcast play can touch the heart to its very depths while gripping the intellect. Such a drama is Martin Lynch 's Pictures of Tomorrow (BBC Northern Ireland for R3. Sunday, April 9) which, under the direction of Michael Quinn, has made a triumphant ...

... Merely flirting with infidelity By MOIRA PETTY Jane Austen's most successful heroines are flawed, although not fatally, but in a little known text. Lady Susan (R4, from Monday, January 11), dramatised by Lavinia Murray in 15-minute chunks, the central character seems without any saving graces. leasing or rone. Harriet waiter played the merry widow whose habit was to enrapture men and enrage ...

... Re-Joycing BY MORIA PETTY I doubt whether there has been a themed season that was as much a delight to the senses, while laying bare the scabrous wastes of human souls, as Radio 4's series of dramas and readings from James Joyce's Dubliners. In A Mother (R4, Saturday, October 10) Amanda Burton played an Irish matriarch with such shrewish power that she quite extinguished all memories of her ...

... Priestley's people all remain beaten by time ONE author famously preoccupied with time was JB Priestley, or perhaps he just preferred to play God with his characters. A season celebrating the centenary of his birth sent shrill, terribly English types all over the radio, the most prescient of them having the ter rible fortune of being able to look back to what they had lost, or for ward to ...

... Bewitched, bothered and bewildered by MOIRA PETTY The TRUEST notes of the Operama season have been found in those plays where writers have used the opera's source material as a starting point for their own flights of fantasy. Such was Christopher Fitz-Simon's delight ful comedy of deathbed manners, Johnny Sheehy (R4, Thursday, December 8), whose provenance was Puccini's one act Gianni Schicci. ...

... Hearing the final notes of horror by MOIRA PETTY LIFE'S last, long drawn out gasp was a death rattle that echoed all that had gone before, in David Rudkin's virtuoso play The Haunting of Mahler (BBC Pebble Mill for R3, Sunday, October 16), directed by Phillip Martin. I he composer s near death scenes were as much the beginning as the end, in a drama that was a symphony in blacks and greys. ...

... It's for posterity, my dear Watson by MOIRA PETTY SHOWBUSINESS used to be full of Cockneys like Benny Green, cheeky chappies with purist accents that seem almost affected next to the pervasive Estuary-Speak. You couldn't help reflecting, on hearing Green's week long series Music Hall Memoirs (Green Mann Productions for R3; from Monday, September 26), that it can't be long before he's ...

... Prejudice is food for thought BY MOIRA PETTY The straitjacket of unspoken fears, forcing a family into seclusion, was the moving theme of John Dodd Gets Taken for a Ride (Tight Assets Theatre for R4, Wednesday, July 8). Prejudice imagined was clearly worse than the prejudice that would have been experienced had John's family not decided to hide him away for more than 30 years. They put an ...

... Getting to the heart of matters BY MOIRA PETTY Radio drama has, over the past fortnight, touched the very nerve centre of human relationships, poetically or comically, always tellingly. Gill Adams' idiosyncratic Jump to Cow Heaven (R4 Monday, March 30) was a comic love story, no less touching because of the dysfunctional nature of the participants. Mad Frankie (David Troughton) had escaped ...

... Loving look at pioneering days BY MOIRA PETTY It is right that contemporary stage plays should be adapted for radio, to which other media owe a debt. The case of Stephen Poliakoff's Talk of the City (R3, Sunday, May 9) is more pressing than its simultaneous ability to entertain and provoke. For the play recreates the early days of light entertainment on BBC radio and the fledgling attempts by ...

... The Street of dreams Rising star Fiona Allen is part of a new comedy team and has enjoyed drama success. Now she is taking on a part in her favourite soap opera By BOB EBORALL To gain exposure, an actor or actress cannot go wrong these days with a part in the oldest and most successful soap. Coronation Street - which has certainly got some very strong storylines. So it was no wonder that Fiona ...