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Radio review: Drama on 4: It Can’t Happen Here, Evil Genius with Russell Kane, and Short Works

11 October 2024

BBC

Drama on 4 (Radio 4, Saturday) dramatised Sinclair Lewis’s 1936 novel It Can’t Happen Here

Drama on 4 (Radio 4, Saturday) dramatised Sinclair Lewis’s 1936 novel It Can’t Happen Here

YOU know not to trust someone if they quote with approval 2 Kings 18.31-32. The vision of “a land of grain and new wine, of bread and vineyards”, sounds appealing; but, as any Church Times reader will know, it comes from the mouth of an Assyrian king and is not to be trusted. When Sinclair Lewis, in his 1936 novel It Can’t Happen Here, has the passage quoted by his arch-villain, he may have expected his biblically literate readership to get the irony. Mike Walker, whose adaptation of the novel occupied the Drama on 4 slot last Saturday, cannot bank on the same intuition.

Inevitably, this story of the populist United States senator-turned-dictator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip will encourage comparisons with current US politics — as other adaptations of Lewis’s work have. The title itself disposes of the need, felt so often by the BBC in its promotion of historical drama, to claim contemporary relevance. Yet Windrip is not a good proxy for Donald Trump, and we do better to engage with the historical context of its composition: the 1930s and the rise of European fascism. Walker’s ingenious adaptation allows us to do just that: it recounts Windrip’s rise to absolute power through a series of archive interviews with a newspaper editor from the period.

The first steps on the journey to totalitarianism are perhaps the most compelling and unsettling, as the Church — represented by one Bishop Prang of the Congregation of the Airwaves — says that Buzz will “smite the Malachites”. (As for whom the Malachites might represent, take your pick.) The senator is a man who can “drink a cream soda with the Methodists, and a beer with the Lutherans”. But faith leaders are useful only for so long; and, after Windrip has achieved power, Bishop Prang disappears from public life, last heard of in an asylum.

Is Windrip a genius, or just evil? The two are not mutually exclusive, although Evil Genius with Russell Kane (BBC Sounds, released each Wednesday) would have it so. At the end of each frenetically comedic episode, the contributors are asked whether the subject for the week is evil or a genius. Last week, Rasputin split the panel into disgust and admiration (“An epic lad!” declared one panellist) in equal measure.

If you can get past the competitive banter and obsessive prurience, this is actually quite a good show. Russell Kane just about manages to keep it rattling along, and some of the contributors seem to have spent some time, at least, on Wikipedia. There are an increasing number of podcasts in which history is turned over to comedians, hungry for material, to eviscerate; this may be the least worst that I’ve yet encountered.

It is heartening to find, in Short Works (Radio 4, last Friday), that inventive radio is still nurtured. You couldn’t claim that Andrew, Is That You?, by the writing duo the Cullen Brothers, is experimental. But its tale of grief and reincarnation is well-delivered and touching.

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