A Place of Greater Safety

Radio 4 puts out a colossal amount of drama, so it's sometimes a challenge to pick what to chance one's time on. Quite a few years ago now, I figured out that if Carl Prekopp was in it, it was almost always worth listening to – whether this was because I liked the sort of stories that had a character he was likely to play, or because the best radio directors had him on call, or because he elevated the material all on his own, I don't know, but it's a rule of thumb with very few disappointments. It's been quite a while since he was a regular in the radio drama studio, which I can't convince myself is entirely coincidental with the general decline in really brilliant radio dramas. They've managed to coax him back to play the lead (brilliantly) in A Place of Greater Safety, a dramatisation of Hilary Mantel's novel about (some of) the leaders of the French Revolution – yes, the Wolf Hall Hilary Mantel, like I was not going to listen.

I assume the dramatised double narrator is a product of the adaptation, and to be frank I found it a little hard to keep track of them on top of the already broad cast of generally similar-sounding people, but once I got the hang of it the conceit has grown on me a lot. Lizzy Watts can do a lot more radio, please.