Features

Tense times: from left, Naomie Harris, Ruth Wilson and David Oyelowo in Small Island

Small Island - Black pride and British prejudice

Andrea Levy's prize-winning novel 'Small Island' has been turned into a TV drama. Guy Adams talks to its fast-rising star, David Oyelowo

Inside Features

Observations: No need to touch that dial

Friday, 4 December 2009

Blame the cold, winter nights and a need for credit-crunch friendly entertainment, but radio dramas have been enjoying a renaissance of late. The opportunities for tuning into them, though, have been limited to catching up with Radio 4 on the wireless. Now the production company Made in Manchester (MIM) have teamed up with The Independent on Independent Drama, a series of plays which can be downloaded and listened to online or on your iPod for free. Last month, a dramatisation of the final thoughts of persecuted code-breaker Alan Turing premiered online. It's followed today by Death in Genoa, Thomas Wright's fictionalised account of Oscar Wilde's Italian escapades in the late 1890s, following his release from jail. "It's the period when he was unproductive. He just gave up," says Simon Callow, who plays Wilde. "He had no money and he'd lost his subject. He wrote about society and he was now an exile from it. He was completely captivated by the idea of just having a lovely, sexy time with boys and drinking a lot. His native hedonism took over." Wilde's 18-year-old Italian lover/ rent boy is played by Samuel Barnett (The History Boys) while Joyce Branagh (sister of Kenneth) directs.

The Week In Radio: The Archers is a tale of country folk stands the test of time

Thursday, 3 December 2009

As Alan Bennett said, you only have to eat a boiled egg at 90 and they think you deserve the Nobel Prize, and in radio too, being venerable often means getting away with less than the best. Radio can be ruthless – the digital stations 6 and 7 have barely begun and Mark Thompson is musing on their demise in a post-apocalyptic world where the licence fee is cut and a director- general's salary has to dip below the half-million mark. But there are some Methuselahs like The Archers, which remain untouchable. At 58 years and counting, the question is whether radio's favourite soap is having a senior moment or is it as fresh as ever?