I begin with a chuckle that turns into a lament. The Pickerskill Reports, the series in which a former public school master reminisces in a tone as lacerating as it is fond, is no more....
A tender but bruising account of dementia is filtered through an architect's view of the world in Nicola Baldwin's Tony and Rose. But all the design mantras in the world can't help a son fac…
The moon has many a sail-on part in Ian McMillan's deliciously quirky and poetic paean to his parents, Love, War and Trains " so much so that it's a wonder it doesn't get a mention...
If Noel Coward's Present Laughter is, as generally agreed, drawn from his own life, he goes beyond self-portrait and self-caricature into unflinching self-laceration. Pier Productions' new r…
It's ironic that Philip Larkin's first novel, Jill, written at 21, features a bumbling young protagonist in a series of embarrassments, when he later declared the work itself a juvenile …
Greek economist and tragedian Vicky Pryce was photographed looking at cheap radios the weekend before being imprisoned, along with ex-Lib Dem MP Chris Huhne, for perverting the course of jus…
We're in a bar and our charmless 'hero' is slurring a compliment. The air is full of cheap come-ons and expensive scent, the kind a man buys for his mistress. The pair reminisce drunkenly ab…
A few crummy pop songs and an indifferent script don't make a musical " as Viva Forever! demonstrates. But not even when the music is brilliant can you prop a thin dramatic edifice alongside…
If George Orwell were alive today, he would be a pundit par excellence " whoops! He hated the use of foreign phrases " firing off trenchant opinions on platforms not available in his day, co…
Arriving in a fleet of three, like wise men, blind mice and Bronte sisters, Michael Frayn's dramas have dominated the mid-January airwaves. With his 80th birthday due in September, perhaps s…
The best thing about returning to normal after the Christmas and New Year break is that you know what day of the week it is. But before then, festive ennui led to an unusual experiment...
A huge array of quality drama and documentaries awaits listeners over the holiday period, writes Moira Petty
The Leveson Inquiry was an artful employer of celebrities and provided easier PR/career enhancement than broiling in the Australian jungle. Whatever Leveson's conclusions, a radio play in wh…
The homicidal urge that festers under cover of village fetes, rose-pruning and parish minutes probably translates to every culture, but has been skewered most successfully by the British as …
I have become a Scandi-nut devouring Nordic TV series, seduced by the greenish tinge of the picture, the teach-yourself-Swedish potential of the Malmo scenes in The Bridge and the phenomenal…
With its sad monsters, brave heroines, fairground-style 
charlatans, scientists who are medieval alchemists yet lightning conductors of the latest research, The Gothic Imagination, in …
Unhappy and unequal marriages exist anywhere there are people. Social realism, as a dramatic genre, can be carted from here to Timbuktu. But can you transpose Nordic gloom to the Indian subc…
When Lee Hall was called upon to update Close The Coalhouse Door, his mentor Alan Plater's 1968 theatrical history of coal mining in the north-east, he announced with due reverence and sensi…