Radio
Under the influence
Michael Vestey
Drunks have had a good week on radio; often a compelling ingredient of drama, they featured in some fine story- telling on Radio Four. I prefer to write when sober but can only marvel at those who are creative while under the influence: Raymond Chandler, for instance, of whom I am a fan.
In Lost Fortnight on Radio Four this week (Thursday), Chandler is persuaded to turn his half-completed novel The Blue Dahlia into a screenplay for Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. It's 1944 and Ladd is about to be conscripted into the army. Paramount wants a Ladd film in the cinemas while he's away. Chandler, his Marlowe novels pub- lished, is the man to do it. But he's been on the wagon for years and two-thirds of the way through shooting he suffers writers' block.
This gem of a play by Ray Connolly, based on a memoir by the film's producer, John Houseman, is so evocative of Holly- wood and Marlowe country that I felt I was back in the pages of The Big Sleep, a tribute to the actors and the director Martin Jenk- ins. Houseman (David Bannerman) struck a rapport with Chandler (Peter Bark- worth): they were both English ex-public schoolboys in a place Chandler described contemptuously as 'the edge of civilisation'.
The Blue Dahlia is about a war hero who returns from the Pacific to find his wife has been unfaithful. She is then murdered. Chandler's original culprit — another war hero, but brain-damaged — is vetoed by the Navy department. So a new villain has to be found. Chandler falters, the director George Marshall (John Hartley) is tearing his hair out. 'Even Veronica Lake is begin- ning to wonder who did the murder,' he says; she is apparently known as Moronica Lake on the set. As they discuss possible suspects — the janitor? the house detec- tive? — someone comes up with the wife's lover. 'Good idea,' says a desperate Mar- shall, 'nobody ever likes a guy who's screwin' the hero's wife.'
Chandler tells Houseman he can only write the last 30 pages of the script after a night's drinking, and at home away from the studio. 'To put it bluntly, I can only find the energy and self-assurance to finish The Blue Dahlia in a bottle of bourbon ... several bottles, actually.' Houseman observes, 'I watched as Ray downed three double martinis, followed by three double stingers. He was happy now.' It works; on a diet of only booze, and glucose injections administered daily by his doctor, the film is completed six days early. Chandler was too weak to attend the celebration party.
'The BBC has, I believe, only one record- ing of chandler's voice, a radio discussion (I think with another heroic drinker Ian Fleming). I heard it some years ago, in poor quality, and, if my memory is correct, he did not sound like Barkworth but in this play the actor is Chandler for me: shrewd, witty and cynical. Lost Fortnight deserves a repeat. In the meantime, pass me a bottle of scotch, will you.
Another English drunk, Ginger Ted, was the hero of The Vessel of Wrath this week on Radio Four (Wednesday), one of six short stories by Somerset Maugham dramatised by Neville Teller and narrated by Dirk Bogarde. Set in the Dutch South Seas, Ginger Ted (Bill Nighy) is reformed by an English missionary Miss Jones (Anna Massey), out of a mixture of gratitude and regret that he did not ravish her when they were stranded on an uninhabited island. Massey plays the outwardly prim Miss Jones with a voice trembling with repressed sexuality. Maugham, a master of the short story, has her marrying Ginger Ted in the end. Not only that, but Ginger Ted takes to converting the natives to Christianity. Although adapting quickly to the missionary position, he has other motives: 'Christ! Can that girl make a treacle pudding.'
I have. not read Maugham for years and had forgotten what a funny writer he could be. Of course, he was pushed out of fashion but I suspect he'll still be read long after the Will Selfs of this world have been for- gotten. Edmund Wilson described him as a `half-trashy novelist, who writes badly, but is patronised by half-serious readers, who do not care much about writing.' Wilson was wrong, in my view, but Maugham knew his limitations. Poetic flights and the great imaginative sweep were beyond his powers, he admitted. Instead, he aimed for lucidity, simplicity and euphony. You can also hear Bogarde reading from his own autobiogra- phies on Radio Two (Fridays).
Browsing through the networks I stum- bled across an Edwardian dowager talking about class. Listening more intently, I dis- covered the speaker was, in fact, Brian Sewell, the London Evening Standard's excellent art critic. He was appearing on Dr David Starkey's Saturday afternoon phone- in on Talk Radio UK. I don't much care for phone-ins, but historian Starkey, the acerbic member of Radio Four's Moral Maze, has transformed this genre into something worth listening to. He will ask a caller, 'Have you read Matthew Arnold?' Or, 'The sixteenth century is my period ...' And his callers seem a cut above the aver- age.
Now some news from Birthall. Radio producers at Broadcasting house have been told to ask all interviewees if they are black or disabled. Even the programme editors are somewhat baffled by this but it seems to be something to do with 'monitoring' contributors. `Before we start the interview, Mr Heseltine, I have to ask you if you're black or disabled ..."Sorry, Mr Humphrys, neither.' The old place gets madder by the hour.
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