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Reasons for hope

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

Start the Week (BBC Radio 4); Fortunes of War (BBC Radio 4)

Harriet learns not to be disappointed by Guy’s seeming indifference, his incapacity for connection. This is not a story about a troubled relationship, but about the stresses of marriage set against the strains put on it by the threat of war, about how people react to crisis, to conflict. There’s a bigger story here, about the testing of values and beliefs, and why there’s something irritatingly admirable about insisting on carrying on as normal even when everything is falling down around you.

At first I was really put off by the production (by Marc Beeby), which had lots of background noise — gypsy music, boisterous café conversation, street hubbub — but I found myself drawn in by the dramatisation (by Lin Coghlan), in which an older Harriet (played by Joanna Lumley), looks back on her younger self (Honeysuckle Weeks). Lumley has such a distinctively plummy accent, but her voice was blended so cleverly with the younger Harriet’s that I began not to notice the transitions. At one point I was startled to realise that in my imagination I had moved without being conscious of it from remembering Christmas Day in Bucharest in 1939 to actually being there at the Pringles’ dining table listening to the conversation of Guy’s oddball friends. A real radio moment.