Radio Roundup

[tealin]

I've been very busy, but not the sort of busy that takes a lot of radio to get through. Luckily a weekend spent drawing has coincided with a glut of good programming, so here's another Radio Roundup ...

FUNNY
John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme - I mean, how can you say no. It's like ice cream, with or without slightly-off Disney characters on the side of the van. This episode has an unprecedented number of American accents.
Just a Minute - Mr Finnemore is back in a slightly more recent recording, in which he politely battles three veterans of this classic game of wits and rhetoric.
Facts and Fancies - Armando Iannucci has gone on to fame and (presumably) fortune producing comedy shows for TV, but this is a series of surreal comic essays from before all that, proving he Had It from day one.
Knocker - All the comedic potential of being a door-to-door market researcher.
The Rest is History - History-based comedy panel game, in which guests guess about historical things and an expert tells them what they got right.
The Unbelievable Truth - Fact-based comedy panel game, in which guests spout a stream of lies with some hidden truths, their co-panellists guess what those are, and the host tells them what they got right.
The News Quiz - There isn't anything particularly notable about this episode, just a reminder that the News Quiz is a thing that exists, and as long as it continues to do so, the world won't be all bad.

SERIOUS
Hamlet - I have a Definitive Hamlet so cannot judge any other equitably; however, this radio production isn't bad, so if you don't have my baggage you might really enjoy it.
Julius Caesar - You can hear the above's Hamlet as Marc Antony in this radio adaptation of a play for which I don't have prior baggage, and therefore am comfortable saying is quite good. It expires in just over a week, so listen quickly.
Beware of the Dog - Roald Dahl writes for grownups – a story about a downed airman in WWII and the benefits of joined-up thinking.
The Man Who Was Thursday - If you think ideological radicals blowing people up in public places is a recent phenomenon, check out G.K. Chesterton's rather exciting story about the infiltration of an anarchists' collective in the early 20th century.
Freud vs Jung - A nice in-depth hour-long documentary on the relationship between the famous fathers of psychology.
Habbakuk of Ice - WWII wasn't short of nutty ideas, but I hadn't heard of the battleship made of ice until this radio play came my way.

Comments

[tealin]

Yeah, I saw it live, both in the park and the following winter in the company's studio space – fairly different productions because of the possibilities/limitations of the respective spaces (the park's was much broader, and the studio's more intimate and intense, but both good in their own ways and both surprisingly funny). I call it definitive because I thought they brought unprecedented clarity and insight to the text – all other productions since then, I feel like, to some extent, they're just saying the words, whereas in this one they really understood them, and in doing so we understood them too, what was under and inside the language rather than just on top of it. Hamlet himself was the perfect mix of profound overthinker and studenty manchild, but all the characters really rang, and their relationships – Ophelia was a fully rounded human being, not just a victim; the Polonius family's relationship of surface tension with underlying love; the just-on-the-verge-of-uncomfortable sexual frisson between Gertrude and Claudius which made Hamlet's irritation so very understandable; Horatio being an actual person instead of a dumb post for Hamlet to talk at, and a lovable sympathetic person at that... I hesitate to say 'best' about any interpretation of the play, because that's so subjective, but their takes on characters and staging of scenes did seem to bring more out of the text, and build it into something even bigger than itself, in a way I haven't seen any other production do. Someday I want to draw the whole play how they did it, but there is so much to do in the meantime ... I have marked up my script with everything I can remember about it, though, lest I forget. :) Pretty much everything under my Hamlet tag on Tumblr is based on that production.

Is the Russian one still on iPlayer? I'm in (appropriately) Denmark right now so can't watch it, but would love to when I get back ... You've got me curious!

[baruyon]

Oh cool! It really does sound amazing. I know what you mean by actors seeming disconnected from the language and meaning behind it. I mean, it's fully open to interpretation, and yet there's so many recordings of famous actors just reciting sonnets in sexy radio baritone... it seems more like an actor's rite of passage to 'do Shakespeare', rather than a chance to understand the text more deeply and help modern audiences understand it better. Is there any way to watch your Definitive Hamlet? Is it on DVD still? I'm really intrigued now! ^^
Also, did any of the people involved in that production see your fanart of it? It's a shame if they didn't, I looked through the Hamlet tag on your tumblr and I loved your drawings. ^^

The Russian adaptation is up for 7 more days on iPlayer if you still want to catch it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03b7x2r/hamlet
I read afterwards that it was considered by Kenneth Branagh to be the definitive film version and I thought 'uh oh', (because I slept through most of Branagh's Hamlet in high school, oops), but the Russian version has quite a poetic quality (visually and aurally) and it's interesting to hear the lines spoken in Russian. It also takes the Kurosawa approach of using music and sound, nature, weather, passages of silence and so forth to put across a character's state of mind. Probably not the acceptable way of adapting something as famously language-based as a Shakespeare play but I think this is because it's a) a Soviet era film and thus dialogue was cut out, in particular allusions to religion and b) it's Hamlet's story seen through a another country's cultural lens. ^^

[tealin]

I .... may be able to help you with the DVD. :)

Thanks for the iPlayer link! I'm back on Saturday so I ought to be able to catch it.

[baruyon]

:o Really? That's very kind of you, but I hope it wouldn't mean any time or expense for you or anything!