A double dose of BBC1 drama at the weekend (Silent Witness, Casualty) left me wondering whether there’s a link between the falling crime figures announced last week and the levels of blood and bestiality now showing nightly on TV. With so much violence available at the switch of a button, who needs to create their own? (Bear with me, the connection with radio will soon become apparent.) What surprised me was not just the amount of violence but also the lack of any real motivation. It was all completely unbelievable (in spite of the best efforts of the make-up department) and meaningless, and as a consequence mind-numbingly dull. Which is why it’s such a relief to turn on the radio on Sunday afternoon and be taken into the no less nasty, if a lot less bloody world of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles (Radio 4).
Set in a cathedral close in the imaginary county of Barsetshire, these tales of Anglican life are fuelled by malicious gossip, gleeful snobbery, overweening ambition and devious doings — all of which we come across every day. They give us real people — even though the stories are set among clerical life and in an era so long gone. We squirm when the oleaginous Obadiah Slope (played by Richard Lumsden) opens his mouth because we know people like him and have either been one of his victims as he attempts to climb the greasy pole to power and advancement or know someone who has.
This latest adaptation of the novel series began last week with The Warden brilliantly cut down into 90 minutes of radio by the poet Michael Symmons Roberts. This week we met Slope for the first time in Nick Warburton’s dramatisation of the second book, Barchester Towers.
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