Hollywood's brightest stars fail to grasp the art of radio
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It’s not often you get a BBC radio drama stuffed with Hollywood megastars, but the cast of People Who Knew Me (BBC Sounds) draws the eye. Rosamund Pike and Hugh Laurie star in an adaptation of the bestselling novel by Kim Hooper. It’s made by Sharon Horgan’s production company, Merman, which is also responsible for TV and film including the wonderful Motherland and the Bafta-winning Bad Sisters.
People Who Knew Me has been released on BBC Sounds this week, though it won’t be broadcast on Radio 4 until mid-June. Given that Rajar listening figures last week revealed that Radio 4 has already lost more than a million listeners, it’s quite a bold decision to release one of their most high-profile programmes of the year online a month before broadcasting it, but anyway.
It’s the story of Emily (Pike), who faked her own death on 9/11 and fled to California. But when she’s diagnosed with breast cancer, for the sake of her 13-year-old daughter, she decides to confront her past, including her “widowed” former husband. The drama has the elements of a thriller, and not just because of Pike, star of David Fincher’s Gone Girl. A strong plot and spicy 15-minute episodes keep up the pace. But the storytelling is fragmented in short scenes to a quick-fire soundscape of repeated intakes of breath and single musical notes held to build tension, which meant that I kept thinking, this would be so much easier if I could just see what was happening. And radio should never make you feel like this.
Radio isn’t just TV without the pictures. It requires a unique approach. A lot of multi-platform production companies do understand this, and actors too. But Pike and Laurie, for all their gifts of performance, sometimes sound here as though they are acting for a non-existent camera. And, while Pike’s voice is deliciously sexy and languorous, giving Connie/Emily a bewitching femme fatale edge, she sometimes struggles to find the fragile introspection that would give the story more depth. There’s a long production credits list of executives and co-executives and assistants, but some of the best radio drama is made with a skeleton crew.
It’s an intimate medium that lends itself to visionary auteurs, not committees. I’d love to hear a version of this story stripped of its audio baubles so the story can shine on its own.
On the subject of shining, the mind turns to Rylan, he of the famously shiny teeth, who this week on Radio 4 debuted his new interview series, How to Be a Man (Radio 4, Thursday). It was available on BBC Sounds three weeks ago, and now it’s made it to radio, where Rylan contemplates modern masculinity across 10 episodes interviewing people with different perspectives, including boxer Amir Khan, interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, and the journalist Freddy McConnell, who is a trans man and has given birth to two children. And, er, Janet Street-Porter.
In the first episode, Rylan interviewed wildlife film-maker and 2022 Strictly Come Dancing winner, Hamza Yassin, who described himself as an old-fashioned gentleman who wants to be the one who pays for the lady on a date. Masculinity is an interesting topic, even a vital one, and Rylan is funny and sensitive and completely himself in tackling it. But the combination of Rylan, Radio 4, and masculinity chat doesn’t quite add up. Rylan is amiable and open, but he isn’t a very analytical interviewer, and it feels as though all the guests are, broadly, a particular type of person in the public eye.
On the topic of modern masculinity, I’d rather hear from non-famous men who have more occasion than other people to think about masculinity and how it shapes their lives. For example, a man working in a female-dominated sphere such as social care, or as a primary-school teacher. Or men who choose to spend time in all-male environments, such as male voice choirs or rugby teams.
Anyway, I’m a woman, so perhaps I’m not the target audience. But then, the series editor is a woman (Yvonne Alexander, who is also executive producer on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories). I’m only pointing this out because, if a man were the editor for a series called “How to Be a Woman” then people would point that out. This series is full of strange decisions. And, this week, it contributes to a sense that Radio 4 is currently quite confused about what it wants to be, and who is listening.
