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BBC Radio 4

Producer and writer John Yorke has worked in television and radio for 30 years, and he shares his experience with Radio 4 listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact behind the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in Radio 4's weekend afternoon dramas.

Opening Lines

In the months that followed the end of the Second World War, very few people in the West knew the true power of the atomic weaponry that had forced the Japanese surrender. John Hersey’s article Hiroshima would change that.

Released a year after the bombs were dropped, the New Yorker piece was journalistic dynamite and sold out in hours. Published in one instalment - taking up the whole edition of the magazine - Hersey’s meticulous and unflinching account of what happened after the atom bomb detonated brought home the horror of atomic weaponry to the world and changed journalism in the process. 

John Yorke speaks to Janine di Giovanni, award winning war reporter and founder of The Reckoning Project (a war crimes unit that operates in Ukraine and the Middle East) about how pivotal the article was and how it impacts her work today.

John has worked in television and radio for 30 years, and shares his experience with listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative, including many podcasts for R4.

Contributors:
Janine di Giovanni, war reporter and founder of The Reckoning Project.
David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker
John Hersey, author

Archive: 
The David Remnick audio, and the John Hersey interview (taken from the American Audio Prose Library interview conducted by Kay Bonetti Callison, 1988) were both originally broadcast as part of Hersey’s Hiroshima produced by Dora Productions Ltd, BBC Radio 4 2016.

Reader: Riley Neldam
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Hub Coordinator: Nina Semple
Producer: Tolly Robinson
Executive Producer: Sara Davies

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

Hiroshima

John Yorke takes a look at The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark. Published in 1963, two years after the success of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, it’s set in the summer of 1945. A group of young women live, love and lodge together in the shabby but respectable May of Teck Club in the months between VE Day and the ending of the war 99 days later with the final victory in Japan. 

It’s a riveting yet disconcerting read - simple, yet knotty and complex, and it’s not at all about what it seems. With contributions from the writer AL Kennedy, John explores the pleasures of this short yet wonderfully satisfying novella.

John has worked in television and radio for 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy, he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative - including many podcasts for R4.

Contributor: A.L. Kennedy

Reader: Ruth Sillers
Producer: Laura Grimshaw
Executive Producer: Sara Davies
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Hub Co-ordinator: Nina Semple

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

The Girls of Slender Means

John Yorke looks at King Lear, the brutal tragedy that some claim is Shakespeare’s greatest achievement.

When Lear, the 80 year old king of ancient Britain, decides that the time has come to divide his kingdom among his three daughters, he unwittingly sets in motion a catastrophic chain of events that will tear apart both his family and his realm. He banishes his faithful youngest daughter, Cordelia, while his two elder daughters, Goneril and Regan, who declared their undying love for their father, bar their doors to him. Driven mad by fury, Lear wanders a barren heath in the midst of a storm with only his Fool for company. 

In this second of two episodes, John looks at the loyal but provocative character of the Fool. He also discovers that, since the 17th century, critics including Samuel Johnson have struggled with the play’s remorseless cruelty and the bleakness of its ending.

John has worked in television and radio for 30 years, and shares his experience with Radio 4 listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatized in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative, including many podcasts for R4.

Contributors:
Sir Richard Eyre, directed an award-winning production of King Lear, starring Ian Holm, at the National Theatre in 1997 and another production for BBC television, with Anthony Hopkins in the lead role, in 2018.
Dr Genevieve von Lob, clinical psychologist who specialises in family therapy.
Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Tutorial Fellow at Hertford College, Oxford. She is the author of books including This Is Shakespeare: How to Read the World’s Greatest Playwright.

Excerpt taken from the BBC Radio 3/Renaissance Theatre Company production of King Lear, directed by Glyn Dearman and first broadcast on Radio 3 on 10th April 1994.

Sound: Sean Kerwin
Music: Torquil MacLeod
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Coordinator: Nina Semple
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Executive Producer: Sara Davies

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

King Lear - Episode Two

John Yorke looks at King Lear, the brutal tragedy that some claim is Shakespeare’s greatest achievement.

When Lear, the 80 year old king of ancient Britain, decides that the time has come to divide his kingdom among his three daughters, he unwittingly sets in motion a catastrophic chain of events that will tear apart both his family and his realm. In this first of two episodes, the focus is on the fractured relationship between Lear and his daughters – Goneril, Regan and Cordelia – and on the subplot that involves the breakdown of another family. This comprises the Duke of Gloucester and his two sons Edmund and Edgar. In both cases the fathers are incapable of seeing which child is deceiving them and which child is loyal and truly loves them.

John has worked in television and radio for 30 years, and shares his experience with Radio 4 listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatized in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative, including many podcasts for Radio 4.

Contributors:
Sir Richard Eyre, directed an award-winning production of King Lear, starring Ian Holm, at the National Theatre in 1997 and another production for BBC television, with Anthony Hopkins in the lead role, in 2018.
Dr Genevieve von Lob, clinical psychologist who specialises in family therapy.
Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Tutorial Fellow at Hertford College, Oxford. She is the author of books including This Is Shakespeare: How to Read the World’s Greatest Playwright.

Excerpt taken from the BBC Radio 3/Renaissance Theatre Company production of King Lear, directed by Glyn Dearman and first broadcast on Radio 3 on 10th April 1994.

Sound: Sean Kerwin
Music: Torquil MacLeod
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Coordinator: Nina Semple 
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Executive Producer: Sara Davies

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

King Lear - Episode One

The series that examines books, plays and stories and how they work. John Yorke looks at the 1968 theatre novel Next Season by Australian writer and director Michael Blakemore. Based on Blakemore’s lived experience as an actor in English repertory theatre in the late 1950s in Stratford-upon-Avon, the novel has been described as one of the true great theatre novels.

The novel follows young Australian actor Sam Beresford as he joins a six-month repertory season in the fictional town of Braddington, where he brushes up with the company’s great stars and battles with its powerful and aloof director. That the novel’s characters were based on real-life theatre greats that Blakemore knew and worked with meant it caused a stir at the time of publication.

John Yorke has worked in television and radio for 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy, he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative - including many podcasts for R4.

Contributors:
Simon Callow, actor
Greta Scacchi, actor
Michael Billington, author and arts critic

Readings from Next Season by Michael Blakemore (Faber & Faber, 1968)

Reader: Ciaran Owens
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Hub Coordinator: Nina Semple
Producer: Lucy Hough
Executive Producer: Caroline Raphael

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

Next Season

The series that examines books, plays and stories and how they work. John Yorke looks at the 1962 theatre memoir Underfoot in Show Business by Helene Hanff. The text is a comic account of Hanff’s attempts to break into New York theatre in the early 1940s, which found a new audience after the success of Hanff’s later epistolary memoir 84, Charing Cross Road.

Underfoot in Show Business is a dispatch from a golden era in New York theatre, in which Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams were actively producing plays. 

John Yorke has worked in television and radio for 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy, he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative - including many podcasts for R4.

Contributor:
Howard Sherman, US writer for The Stage

Readings from Underfoot in Show Business by Helene Hanff (Futura Publications, 1980)
Audio from Friday Night, Saturday Morning (BBC Television, 1980) and Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio 4, 1981)

Reader: Madeleine Paulson
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Hub Coordinator: Nina Semple
Producer: Lucy Hough
Executive Producer: Caroline Raphael

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

Underfoot in Show Business

John Yorke looks at Casino Royale, the novel by Ian Fleming that introduced James Bond to the world. First published in 1953, Fleming’s thrilling novel plunges us immediately into the murky underworld of high stakes gambling. Today we may be more familiar with Bond as portrayed in the movies, but here we discover a more nuanced character. James Bond is vulnerable and at times filled with self-doubt, a far cry from the confident hero on the screen. Bond is on a mission to confront a private banker called Le Chiffre in a baccarat game at the Casino Royale and it doesn’t all go to plan. John Yorke first read Casino Royale at the age of twelve and credits it with a lifetime of enthusiasm for reading novels. In this Opening Lines he explains why.

John has worked in television and radio for 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy, he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative - including many podcasts for R4.

Contributor: 
Kim Sherwood, author and creative writing lecturer, University of Edinburgh

Reader: Matthew Gravelle
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Hub Coordinator: Nina Semple
Producer: Mark Rickards
Executive Producer: Sara Davies

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

Casino Royale

Ian Sansom celebrates the evocative portrait of London on the brink of war that Norman Collins paints in his 1945 novel London Belongs to Me.

The book centres around the lives of the inhabitants of 10 Dulcimer Street, a down-at-heel south London boarding house, and spans the two years from December 1938 to December 1940. Deftly mixing comedy and tragedy, Collins invites us into the lives of these disparate characters, a handful of seemingly unremarkable people whose minor triumphs and bruising setbacks combine to provide a poignant and compelling account of the human face of history, away from the headlines and the corridors of power.

Ian Sansom is a novelist, journalist and broadcaster. He is the author of more than 20 books, including the Mobile Library and the County Guides series of detective novels and his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He has worked as a columnist for The Guardian and The Spectator and currently writes for the TLS, The Irish Times and The Dublin Review. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 4 and Radio 3. He was formerly the Director of the Oscar Wilde Centre at Trinity College Dublin and a professor and Head of English at Queen’s University Belfast.

Contributors:
Ed Glinert, writer, lecturer and historical tour guide
Katherine Cooper, writer, academic and broadcaster

Readings from London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins (Penguin Books, 2008)

Reader: Ewan Bailey
Sound: Sean Kerwin 
Researcher: Henry Tydeman 
Production Coordinator: Nina Semple
Producer: Torquil MacLeod 
Executive Producer: Caroline Raphael

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

London Belongs to Me

The novel Kramer Versus Kramer was published in the US in 1977 and was an instant bestseller. Its story of a marriage, a divorce and a fierce custody battle tapped into the highly charged debates of the time about changing sex roles, marriage and parenting. It was immediately optioned by Hollywood, and the film came out in 1979 starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. 

Attitudes to custody at the time - which were still rooted in the idea of a wife as a homemaker and carer - were at odds with the sweeping demands for change made by the women’s movement, and it’s this tension that lies at the heart of the story. John hears from Sue Moss, top New York divorce and custody attorney, about how the legal landscape has changed, and from dramatist Sarah Wooley about what drew her to the story.

John has worked in television and radio for 30 years, and shares his experience with Radio 4 listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative, including many podcasts for Radio 4.

Contributors:
Sue Moss, partner at Chemtob Moss & Forman LLP, New York
Sarah Wooley, dramatist of BBC Radio 4’s production of Kramer vs Kramer

Reader: Riley Neldam
Producers: Tolly Robinson, Sara Davies
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Production Hub Coordinator: Nina Semple
Executive Producer: Caroline Raphael

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

Kramer Versus Kramer

Patrick Ashby died nine years ago. Now, out of the blue, he returns home to claim his inheritance. Except, of course, it’s not Patrick but an imposter, Brat Farrar. 

In this episode of Opening Lines John Yorke examines Josephine Tey’s classic 1949 novel that set the standard for so many crime writers to come. He examines the themes of the book and Tey’s life, itself a story of multiple identities and hidden lives. The programme features writer Nicola Upson, a member of the prestigious elite Detection Club, whose own crime novels feature Josephine Tey as detective.

John Yorke has worked in television and radio for 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy, he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative - including many podcasts for R4.

Interview with Val McDermid, BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, 20th August 2015

Producer: Caroline Raphael 
Reader: Janet Ellis
Executive Producer: Sara Davies 
Production Hub Coordinator: Nina Semple
Sound: Sean Kerwin

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

The Girls of Slender Means

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