Episode 1

It's 1930 and Hitler's rise to power has begun. Three year old Oskar decides to stop growing and stop talking. Instead he plays his tin drum.

Phil Daniels stars as Oskar alongside Kenneth Cranham and Lesley Manville in Mike Walker's two-part dramatisation of Gunter Grass's dark and intriguing story.

Written in 1959, The Tin Drum is a modern classic of post-Second World War literature, telling the story of the Third Reich's decline and fall from a most particular perspective - that of a dwarf. It was published at a time when a generation of Germans was seeking to understand the war for the first time.

Oskar ...... Phil Daniels
Matzerath ...... Kenneth Cranham
Agnes ...... Lesley Manville
Bebra ...... David Collings
Jan ...... Stephen Critchlow
Greff ...... Paul Jenkins
Gretchen ...... Kristin Milward
Roswitha ...... Jane Whittenshaw
Marcus ...... John Turner
Fisherman ...... John Hartley
Midwife ...... Tessa Worsley

Gunter Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999 and the Swedish Academy praised him as a writer 'whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history'.

Mike Walker's efforts won him the Writer's Award for Best Dramatisation.

Producer: Peter Kavanagh

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in June 1996.