Two dramas, two very different plots and personnel. One was political, the other intensely personal. Both were new, commissioned for radio, and defiantly worth paying the licence fee for. This was theatre at its riveting and thought-provoking best, and for which we as listeners didn’t have to leave the house or pay the price of a West End ticket. (The writers, meanwhile, will most probably not have a secure, cash-rich pension to look forward to, unlike the striking staff of the Corporation whose brief exodus produced a startling change to the morning routine just when it’s most needed at the beginning of dreary November.)
I almost gave Matthew Solon’s Five Days in May (Saturday afternoon, Radio 4) a miss, having heard endless trails for the play which gave us gossipy politicians plotting the downfall of Gordon Brown and the Cameron–Clegg coalition rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the election-without-a-winner. It all sounded strangely like yesterday’s news; as if in just six months we’ve become so conditioned to coalition politics that we’re already jaundiced about its possibilities. Has anything really changed?
A few minutes into the drama and I was still not convinced. Did I really need to know what once happened in the backrooms of Whitehall between Friday 7 May and Tuesday 11 May 2010? We’re never going to know the real story anyway. It was also a bit odd hearing actors trying to be characters who are still very much with us. ‘What’s the Lib Dem policy on sleep?’ asks one of Clegg’s aides. ‘Clear and decisive,’ retorts Clegg. ‘Total abolition.’ Did this conversation really happen, I couldn’t help thinking in the back of my brain as the front was processing the scene being played out on air.
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