The Week on Radio: Life in Death on the ocean waves

What happened, presumably, is that somebody down at the BBC noticed that Bloomsday was approaching - 16 June, that would have been last Monday - and thought it would be the proper thing to broadcast something to do with Ulysses. But by the time the message filtered down to the drama department, it was smudged with spilt coffee and a crease had spoiled an important word, and instead they commissioned a dramatisation of HMS Ulysses (Radio 4, Saturday), which is a Second World War naval yarn by Alistair Maclean.

Not that this is grounds for complaint. If nothing else, this small freak of scheduling provides an excuse for some spurious generalisations on cultural distinctions between Britain and Ireland (which can be summed up as, They have James Joyce, we have Alistair McLean). But in any case, this HMS Ulysses could stand on its own merits.

Ulysses is a British warship escorting a convoy to Murmansk, through thickets of U-boats, swooping flocks of German aircraft and Arctic blizzards which throw up waves hundreds of feet high. It would be possible to concoct a conventionally heroic story out of these ingredients, there are plenty of individual instances of self-sacrifice, calmness in the face of danger and stoicism in the face of disaster, which are the symptoms of heroism. But these are incidental to Maclean's real subjects, which are life made unbearable by fear and suffering, and death.

"She did not sail alone," a voice explained at the beginning of the play, "for death was her constant companion." This sounds melodramatic, but turned out to be a fairly mild preparation for both the high body-count and Maclean's spiritual pretensions. The ship is commanded by Captain Vallery, whose distinguishing marks are a habit of quoting Tennyson ("Ulysses", of course) and advanced TB - at one point, with face drawn white and lips stained red with his own blood, he sounds pretty much like an embodiment of Life in Death (see "The Ancient Mariner" for further details). Elsewhere, living men become ghostly, disembodied presences in the shadows; and the whole voyage becomes a preparation for inevitable death, as the crew is whittled away by weather, enemy action, stupidity and suicide.

As I say, this could been done heroically, but Maclean's moral purpose is rather different. He detects glory in the unwinnable struggle rather than in any possible victory. What he achieves in HMS Ulysses is a strange halfway house between public school spirit (Play up, play up, and play the game) and existentialism: Beau Geste meets Albert Camus. Nick McCarty's script and Bill Bryden's blustery production had the courage to take this to its limits, creating a piece of radio that was occasionally ridiculous and often impossible to follow, but was also one of the most harrowing and impressive things I have heard on radio.

A new series of biographies, Lifestory (Radio 4, Thursday), started off with a mildly disappointing treatment of Fanny Cradock, queen of the TV cooks. Being a snobbish, vain and untruthful woman, she ought to have been the perfect subject for some warts-and-all treatment. Since most of the unpleasantness was pretty self-evident during her lifetime, though, there wasn't much room for revelation on these counts, and elsewhere Nick Baker skimped alarmingly - "No time here to talk about the nose job, the tax problems or the slimming pills," he declared.

What was most interesting, though, was the care he took to justify the programme, getting old friends to testify that she would have wanted the whole truth to come out. "Intrude," you wanted to tell him, "Muck-rake!" Niceness is all very well in life; on radio, it's positively dangerous.