Czech mates

Solo behind the Iron Curtain (Radio Four), International Radio Playwriting Competition (BBC World Service) 

‘I was pretty sure I was being followed,’ he said in that unforgettably sleek drawl. We are in Prague at the height of the Cold War in 1968 and Robert Vaughn, aka Mr Napoleon Solo, is under surveillance. Cue blazing trumpets and a Hammer organ. The man from U.N.C.L.E. (there was a time when every teenager in the land could have told you immediately what those initials stood for) is making a second world war film in the Czech capital with his pals from Hollywood, George Segal and Ben Gazzara, just as Dubcek is being told by the Russians to fall back into line or else. Tracy Spottiswoode’s play Solo behind the Iron Curtain (Radio Four, Monday) took us back to that time, and to what really happened to Vaughn and his American co-stars as the tanks entered Wenceslas Square on the night of 20 August.

Their hotel was surrounded and they found themselves trapped inside with their interpreter, a young Slovak girl who prefers to be known as Pepsi. She has been distributing underground pamphlets and tearing down Russian flags. How can they smuggle her out of the city and across Czechoslovakia to the Austrian border? Solo could have taken out his pen and opened ‘Channel D’, but this is for real. The Russians have opened fire on the Czech crowd and Vaughn and his mates are in actual danger. Worse still, Vaughn has to abandon all his notes for the PhD dissertation (in communications, from the University of Southern California) that he has been working on for decades.

It was lucky that this was on radio. Forty years on, Vaughn would have looked unconvincingly different from his swaggering persona in that cult TV series — but, amazingly, he sounds just the same, with all that slick Sixties wit still intact.