Posted by Ivan Rendall on 19 December 2015 in Blogging
The best, most sublime line in Educating Rita must be when, in response to Frank’s question how she would stage Peer Gynt on a very low budget, Rita says to her raddled old tutor: “Do it on the radio.”
Then there’s the quote (almost a cliché now) about “the pictures being better on radio compared with television!”
These two thoughts seem to have coincided in the Archers Calendar Girls storyline.
Imagine the cost of getting 12 actors with the necessary equipment to strip off and be filmed in 12 separate sequences for television on a closed set – prohibitive, even if the audience was to go through the roof.
And then, even post watershed, it would have to be pixelated and very coy, raising expectations that could never be met.
Television audiences would not get the Full Monty, except possibly for fleeting seconds, while most nights, for a couple of months now, the Archers audience has had pictures galore – rich, fruity, unfettered pictures, uninhibited by editorial rules and considerations of taste.
Wonderful stuff!
There must be hundreds of millions of images stored away in millions of cerebral cortices and the best is yet to come.
We need new R4 drama for the afternoons which follows this pioneering work.
What do we want? More nudity on radio!
When do we want it? All the time!
There will be queues at water coolers: “Did you see The Archers last night, its was terrific…”
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