Play of the Week podcast: Sea Change
Ed's note: On the blog we've been featuring the Play of the Week podcast that's available on Fridays to download and keep. This week's drama Sea Change is from Radio 3 rather than Radio 4 which is perhaps even more reason to feature it here in case some of you missed it. It tells the story of the struggle to establish the coalition government of 1940 - a story of idealism, blackmail, and political skullduggery - PM.
Like 2010, the government of 1940 was a coalition which also ruptured previous political alignments. New political alliances and social organisations - which had first arisen in the Bridgwater Bye-Election of 1938, but which had been ignored by the London-based political and media establishments - united in their fight against appeasement.
Suddenly and dramatically, in May of that year, this new united front rose against the government and, in the space of only three days, overthrew it. Somewhat surprisingly, the magnificent story behind this overthrow is little known. It is a story of ferocious loyalty and betrayal, outrageous media manipulation, blackmail, prejudice - and not a little courage.
Jeremy Mortimer is executive producer, BBC Audio Drama
- More on the Sea Change programme page
- Download the podcast of Sea Change - available until next Friday
Comment number 1.
At 11:43 4th Feb 2012, Russ wrote:A thorougly deserved play of the week in my view, although there has been some doubt expressed about its strict historical accuracy, specifically of the portrayal that the armed forces "had fought no one" by the time of the events concerned (May 1940), and that political fact had been replaced by mere sexy supposition. Personally, I didn't have a problem with the reflection of that stage commonly accepted as the 'phoney war', and I think we should cut playwrights a lot of slack when it comes to the extremely difficult task of imagining what real historical characters might have actually said to each other.
Changing tack, good to see you have been encompassing Radio 3 output in the scope of the Play of the Week, but please do yourself a favour by including Radio 3 drama output in the listings:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/programmes/genres/drama/player/episodes
https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/programmes/genres/drama
Russ
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