It’s been difficult enough in this age of instant Googlification to wait even 24 hours until the next instalment of Radio Four’s latest Dickens serial, Our Mutual Friend, is given its 15-minute airing.
It’s been difficult enough in this age of instant Googlification to wait even 24 hours until the next instalment of Radio Four’s latest Dickens serial, Our Mutual Friend, is given its 15-minute airing. So how did Dickens’s Victorian readers survive a whole month before the next instalment was published and they could at last discover the fate of Eugene Wrayburn? Or the truth about John Rokesmith? Mike Walker’s latest adaptation into 20 compressed episodes is a masterpiece of dramatic tension, casting Lilian and Matt’s wailing on The Archers into the bottomless pit of dud soap storylines.
Dickens knew exactly how to blend lurid tragedy with deadly realism, so that we never quite know which way the story will go. Is the beautiful but poor ‘river girl’ Lizzie Hexam going to be a tragic victim of London’s cruel juxtapositions? Will the wilful Bella Wilfer have her comeuppance? (Over in Ambridge I used to love Lilian’s brassy refusal to conform to the conventions of village life, but who cares now that she’s been remodelled into a vapid version of her former self?)
Dickens invented the soap opera, although not the serialised novel, which could be said to be the brainchild of Charlotte Lennox, who created a magazine in 1760 as a novel way of selling her latest book to a bigger audience. So far no one has surpassed his genius for soap’s key elements: plot, character and location. London and its river are just as much fully fleshed characters in Our Mutual Friend as Lizzie and Bella. You’d think it might be difficult to recreate this on radio, without the aid of visual imagery. But the specially composed music (by Roger Goula) instantly tells us the river’s mood, either sparkling and tinkling on the ebb or flowing fast with a low, vibrating menace.
Mike Walker’s ruse of setting the whole novel within the context of a Dickens lecture gives us an all-seeing, all-knowing narrator, adding depth to what could otherwise become in this cut-down version (900-plus pages compressed into five hours) a bit of a melodrama. ‘What is a man in this world,’ mutters Dickens to himself. ‘What he does. What he strives for … That is what a man is. His work. And my work? I’m the man who wrote London … London and the river.’
Alex Jennings is superb as Dickens, questioning, probing, disclosing, so that we become not simply passive listeners to this tale of dustheaps and drownings down the Thames but active witnesses to what happens. Jessica Dromgoole and Jeremy Mortimer direct.
Birdsong, children giggling, a hoe striking flints — we are in another kind of serial, no less dramatic, also on Radio Four this week. The award-winning natural history team of producer Sarah Blunt and sound recordist Chris Watson, along with their team of experts, have created a fictional garden in Oxfordshire as the setting for their latest aural tapestry. Each 15-minute episode of The Garden, narrated by Peter France, is devoted to a different stage in the garden’s annual ebb and flow from dormant winter to full-blown summer. A snowdrop pushes its way through the iron-hard soil — where the gardener fails to make much headway with a fork. The piercing song of the wren, just 10cm in size, echoes through the crisp February air. If you’re lucky on a day when a skittering of snow has fallen, you might find the traces of a mouse’s paws as it scuffles across the garden foraging for food.
As the wind rattles round the eaves and darkness seeps into the house the sound of brawling bees and frogs purring in content is as good a kind of escapism as any tale by Dickens — and no less dramatic.
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