Post by avalon on Nov 6, 2007 14:22:03 GMT 9.5
SOURCE:Telegraph.co.uk - United Kingdom
On radio: Raw emotions and invisible nudity
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 06/11/2007
The cast of Fame and Fortune are shards of the same shattered mirror, says Gillian Reynolds
Two weeks into Fame and Fortune, Frederic Raphael's sequel to The Glittering Prizes (Radio 4, Sat, repeated Fri) and I want to kill. Not the actors: Tom Conti, Miranda Richardson, Nigel Havers, Angela Down are among a truly outstanding cast. It is the people they are supposed to be.
Or should that be person? They are all so alike, sharp, selfish, sophisticated, sensual, as if they are shards of the same shattered mirror that you can imagine a camera running backwards, gathering them up into a whole again. What pours out of the radio are cascades of cutting quips and perfect putdowns, inner hurts that never heal.
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We are 20 years on from when we first met most of these people. In The Glittering Prizes, they were all at Cambridge. Now it is 1979 and the Conservatives have just swept into office.
Adam, the central figure (Tom Conti), has become a famous novelist. He is rich, married – long-term and happily – to Barbara (Miranda Richardson). They have two children: Tom (at Cambridge) and Rachel, both of them loved and prized.
Serpents lurk in this apparent Eden. Tom's adulterous itch glides back from the past in the shape of Francesca (Poppy Miller), younger sister of one of the Cambridge set whom Adam has portrayed in a book. She is posh, assured, beautiful, vengeful and flirtatious. That's not the big attraction. She once taunted him about his Jewishness.
Part one ended with Adam knocking on her door, his justification being a suspicion of his wife having an affair, based on seeing her coming from the hairdresser and, smiling, going into Claridges. Ah yes, even the suspicions here are hand-tooled.
Part two began with what seemed to be the start of his affair with Francesca. On his command, she takes off her clothes (hot stuff for Radio 4 on a Saturday afternoon!). Then her husband (Julian Rhind-Tutt) comes back and either tries to tempt Adam to a bit of three-way kinkiness or into showing himself up as an old-fashioned, would-be adulterer rather than a swinger. Exit Adam, cheeks burning in shame from having been put down by yet another poshie but flaming with lust.
For the rest of the hour some other plotlines from part one re-emerge – the television franchise that's up for grabs; the gay couple who run a trendy restaurant but whose partnership is threatened by one of them wanting to become a father; son Tom's career at Cambridge. This last ends in an explosion: Tom is leaving Cambridge, becoming a Christian.
There's a final bang: Adam sees the police outside Francesca's house and discovers she and her husband have been murdered, throats cut. Whew! We know the perpetrator can't have been Adam. He's been in bed with Barbara and hearing his son's reasons for quitting Cambridge. Who can it be?
And do I care enough to sit through another four hours of people swapping Cowardesque lines and Woody Allen-type banter to find out? Well, maybe if it's raining and there's a lot of ironing to do.
Hold on. There might be a couple of other reasons. Raphael, who does the linking narration, seems so burdened by the emotions of his characters that to leave it now would be like walking away from someone in desperate need of a listener. He also disarmingly puts perceptive complaints about the way his people are and how they talk into his characters' own mouths.
In part one, Barbara says: "You're not talking, you're writing, Adam. I can hear the typewriter clattering behind every word." By having Barbara say this, Raphael makes both her and Adam more real. Adam's unquenchable despair, at being smarter than everyone else, too clever ever to be happy, remains.
That's certainly lifelike and, I think, what Raphael is really writing about. The side plots about academic change, political rewards, commercial venality, the urge to procreate being stronger than the impulse to fornicate are all sharply observed but are only fan-vaulting to the over-arching theme of being alive and alone.
It probably reads better than it sounds. Great radio, alas, it ain't.
On radio: Raw emotions and invisible nudity
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 06/11/2007
The cast of Fame and Fortune are shards of the same shattered mirror, says Gillian Reynolds
Two weeks into Fame and Fortune, Frederic Raphael's sequel to The Glittering Prizes (Radio 4, Sat, repeated Fri) and I want to kill. Not the actors: Tom Conti, Miranda Richardson, Nigel Havers, Angela Down are among a truly outstanding cast. It is the people they are supposed to be.
Or should that be person? They are all so alike, sharp, selfish, sophisticated, sensual, as if they are shards of the same shattered mirror that you can imagine a camera running backwards, gathering them up into a whole again. What pours out of the radio are cascades of cutting quips and perfect putdowns, inner hurts that never heal.
advertisement
We are 20 years on from when we first met most of these people. In The Glittering Prizes, they were all at Cambridge. Now it is 1979 and the Conservatives have just swept into office.
Adam, the central figure (Tom Conti), has become a famous novelist. He is rich, married – long-term and happily – to Barbara (Miranda Richardson). They have two children: Tom (at Cambridge) and Rachel, both of them loved and prized.
Serpents lurk in this apparent Eden. Tom's adulterous itch glides back from the past in the shape of Francesca (Poppy Miller), younger sister of one of the Cambridge set whom Adam has portrayed in a book. She is posh, assured, beautiful, vengeful and flirtatious. That's not the big attraction. She once taunted him about his Jewishness.
Part one ended with Adam knocking on her door, his justification being a suspicion of his wife having an affair, based on seeing her coming from the hairdresser and, smiling, going into Claridges. Ah yes, even the suspicions here are hand-tooled.
Part two began with what seemed to be the start of his affair with Francesca. On his command, she takes off her clothes (hot stuff for Radio 4 on a Saturday afternoon!). Then her husband (Julian Rhind-Tutt) comes back and either tries to tempt Adam to a bit of three-way kinkiness or into showing himself up as an old-fashioned, would-be adulterer rather than a swinger. Exit Adam, cheeks burning in shame from having been put down by yet another poshie but flaming with lust.
For the rest of the hour some other plotlines from part one re-emerge – the television franchise that's up for grabs; the gay couple who run a trendy restaurant but whose partnership is threatened by one of them wanting to become a father; son Tom's career at Cambridge. This last ends in an explosion: Tom is leaving Cambridge, becoming a Christian.
There's a final bang: Adam sees the police outside Francesca's house and discovers she and her husband have been murdered, throats cut. Whew! We know the perpetrator can't have been Adam. He's been in bed with Barbara and hearing his son's reasons for quitting Cambridge. Who can it be?
And do I care enough to sit through another four hours of people swapping Cowardesque lines and Woody Allen-type banter to find out? Well, maybe if it's raining and there's a lot of ironing to do.
Hold on. There might be a couple of other reasons. Raphael, who does the linking narration, seems so burdened by the emotions of his characters that to leave it now would be like walking away from someone in desperate need of a listener. He also disarmingly puts perceptive complaints about the way his people are and how they talk into his characters' own mouths.
In part one, Barbara says: "You're not talking, you're writing, Adam. I can hear the typewriter clattering behind every word." By having Barbara say this, Raphael makes both her and Adam more real. Adam's unquenchable despair, at being smarter than everyone else, too clever ever to be happy, remains.
That's certainly lifelike and, I think, what Raphael is really writing about. The side plots about academic change, political rewards, commercial venality, the urge to procreate being stronger than the impulse to fornicate are all sharply observed but are only fan-vaulting to the over-arching theme of being alive and alone.
It probably reads better than it sounds. Great radio, alas, it ain't.