Saturday, November 17, 2018

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Timothy Daly - A Lapse In Behaviour





A black comedy for radio

Harold Carpenter is a piano teacher. Middle-aged, mild-mannered, he leads a pleasant, predictable and ordered life. There's the neat house, the beautiful garden and a modest selection of teas and biscuits for favoured pupils. But his peaceful existence is shattered by the arrival of Lois Rowntree - the new music pupil from hell! Lois will not take no for an answer, has more than a bit of 'attitude' and a past scattered with a succession of exasperated teachers. 

Cast:
Harold Carpenter: Peter Carroll
Lois Rowntree: Judi Farr
Colin Rowntree: Neil Fitzpatrick

Technical Producer, Steven Tilley
Associate Producer, Anne Wynter
Produced and directed by David Chandler

Hey, if you can't take bad playing you should never get in the music teaching racket.  You had better be in it for what your students want out of it or you shouldn't even start.  Not unless you're world famous and can afford to dump bad students.   I'm not the tea and cookies kind of teacher, though I have been known to lower my fee for good students who can't afford full price.

There is a long intro which is interesting but the actual play starts a few minutes into the recording.  It does talk about just about everything that makes me prefer radio drama over movies or TV and even most of the stage plays I've seen.  It's a writers and actors medium more about ideas, when it has ideas.  Of course it can be fun, too.

Update:  I'm not surprised Simps doesn't like radio plays, they require imagination and that's something that requires intelligence.  Whatever he imagines is certain to have one quality, it's already been seen a jillion times on TV, everything in his mind is "As Seen on TV". 

8 comments:

  1. "[I] prefer radio drama over movies or TV and even most of the stage plays I've seen."

    Absolutely. If Shakespeare -- excuse me, Francis Bacon -- was alive today, he'd definitely be writing for radio.

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    1. You know as much about Bacon as a kosher butcher does.

      I can imagine the author writing drama for the BBC, after all the guy you figure wrote "Shakespeare's" biography wrote some of his best plays for them, as did Pinter. Becket wrote for radio, Wolfgang Borchert did, actually quite a number of the best playwrights of the 20th century wrote plays for radio. What you, no doubt, consider a great genius based on not knowing anything about him, David Mamet, did. I would guess that many of the BBC's radio dramas got more of an audience than all of the plays attributed to Shake-speare did in the entire life of the writer. He'd be stupid to turn down an offer.

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  2. "I'm not surprised Simps doesn't like radio plays"

    Oh fuck you, you lying philistine piece of shit; I've forgotten more about the history of radio drama than you ever knew. And if you dispute that, get back to me about who the writer/producer of the golden age version of YOURS TRULY JOHNNY DOLLAR was or who wrote SORRY WRONG NUMBER without Googling.

    But more to the point:

    A homeless guy asks a prosperous looking passerby for a couple of bucks for a cup of coffee.

    PASSERBY: Neither a borrower nor a lender be -- Shakespeare.

    HOMELESS GUY: Fuck you -- David Mamet.

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    1. That's the best you can do.

      That's not a question, it's a statement.

      The internet is the stupidest medium through which to make the "I forgot more than you ever knew" challenge because, as even you figured out - after I noted it was what you do - google makes it impossible to test it.

      I have no doubt that you've forgotten more than you ever knew, and you never did.

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  3. Nobody reading this believes you knew the answers to the questions I posed to you, Sparkles. For starters, because you don't even seem to understand that they WERE questions.

    Nobody. You're a fucking crackpot poseur and lying ignoramus. Period, full stop, end of story.

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    1. But Stupy, it would have been pointless to say anything because you'd already said that the only thing I know is through google. One thing anyone who reads this blog knows, I post radio drama just about every week, sometimes more than once a week. How many have you posted at your blog? I like to think what I post is usually pretty high in quality, though opinions on that can vary.

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  4. "I like to think what I post is usually pretty high in quality"

    And some people like to dress up in rubber suits and be spanked with paddles. Proves nothing, Sparkles.

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    Replies
    1. Uh, Simps, what no one is is interested in your sex life.

      Delete