One of the best plays ever written for radio - a traveller, suffering from amnesia, checks into a hotel. But it is like no other.... the staff are evasive; and no-one will tell him where he is. The conversations he has are odd, too; is it his imagination, or has he heard them already? After a while he decides to leave the building, to get his bearings, but each attempt leads him back to his room, and the same conversation he had ten minutes ago....
This play has been broadcast in three versions; two by the BBC and one by ABC (Australia). Both BBC R4 broadcasts were directed by Martin Jenkins.
Starring: John Pullen, Nigel Anthony, Sarah Badel
And the thing that makes it so great is they used low-budget sets from the old MGM back lot.
ReplyDeleteYou still on about that? You really don't have any life of the mind, do you.
DeleteA. The description of the play above isn't mine, it's what one of the people who wrote about it claimed. I think it's pretty good but it's no Seeing In The Dark.
B. As I said when I said it Saturday, it was someone I know who has been involved with film production who told me that the low budgets Rod Serling had to work with was one of the reasons that The Twilight Zone was so heavily concentrated on the writing, acting and directing instead of the decoration of the production.
C. That's a point Rod Serling made about why he was able to try lots of things on radio that he couldn't have if the production costs had been higher. His bosses were willing to let him try stuff on a lower budget. I do think that your vast knowledge of such stuff - gained from a lifetime of not being involved with it and pulled out of nowhere when you want to troll me - is kind of trumped by Rod Serling's career of being successful, artistically and commercially, in it. Call me fussy but I'd rather listen to him than you.
The millions of dollars they spend on movies, producing shit sort of lends credence to what I was told and read. So does the fact that so much of the better TV I've seen from countries that do it was preceded by radio versions of the same thing or produced by people who had radio drama experience.
Oh, and, in case you haven't twigged on, when I post a passage of what someone else said, I set it off in bold italics, something that Echidne suggested to me when I wrote for her, though something you apparently haven't caught on to. It was either her or one of her intelligent readers. She gets those, Duncan doesn't but, then, Duncan doesn't put any effort into it whereas Echidne is one of the best writers on the lefty blogs I read. Don't see how she can stand to bother with E-ton, but she's old enough to make her own bad friends.
DeleteJohn Pullen is god
ReplyDelete