Melanie Phillips, Breaking the Fourth Wall, Jonathan Dee

Available for over a year

With Matthew Sweet. Journalist and broadcaster Melanie Phillips discusses her autobiography Guardian Angel, which reveals details of her unhappy and stifling childhood and her relationship with her fragile mother. Through the prism of this family story, Melanie also explains her dramatic transition from the darling of Britain's liberal left, to the Daily Mail's star columnist and reflects on why she felt it was important to tell this very personal story. The National Theatre is currently mounting Eugene O'Neill's 1928 play Strange Interlude. It is a naturalistic drama performed in a traditional box set, but the characters interrupt the dialogue to share their thoughts with us and even come forward and address the audience directly. Breaking the imaginary fourth wall is usually a theatrical trick but TV characters like Mrs Brown and Miranda do it and of course Shakespeare is famous for soliloquies. Director Simon Godwin, theatre critic Susannah Clapp and TV writer Philip Martin discuss just how porous the fourth wall can be with contributions from Charles Edwards, who is appearing in Strange Interlude. Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Jonathan Dee on his new novel A Thousand Pardons.