Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Listen to the world’s first radio play

Plus: BBC Radio Ulster’s excellent Assume Nothing series goes on the trail of Typhoid Mary

Mary Mallon, AKA 'Typhoid Mary', institutionalised on Brother Island where she stayed from 1914 until her death in 1938. Image: Getty / Bettmann

Radio works its strongest magic, I always think, when you listen to it in the dark. The most reliable example is the Shipping Forecast, that bracing incantation of place names and gale warnings, which – with the lights out – can transform even the most inland bedroom into a wind-battered coastal cottage. But darkness can heighten disturbance, too, as I was reminded when listening to Danger by Richard Hughes, billed as the BBC’s first-ever radio drama. It was first broadcast in 1924, with the audience at home under instructions to maximise its effect by turning off all their lights.

The play’s first audience, in 1924, was under instructions to maximise its effect by turning off all their lights

This version of the play – now on Radio 4 Extra – was recorded in 1973, but I followed the original edict and settled expectantly into the pitch-black. The melancholic strains of Welsh male voices singing drifted forth. Then came footsteps, and a woman’s voice asked anxiously: ‘Hello? What’s happened?’ ‘The lights have gone out,’ replied a man. My goodness, so they have, I thought. As these two stumbled about trying to find each other, the woman pleaded: ‘But the lights, why have they gone out?’ Her companion bluffed a technical explanation, predicting: ‘They’ll turn them up again in a minute.’ I’ll let you into a secret: they don’t.

This young couple, Mary (Carol Marsh) and Jack (Christopher Good), have travelled roughly 1,000ft down a mine, presumably on some kind of tour. They have not only forgotten their miners’ lamps but also become distanced from the others in the group. But they’re not completely isolated: soon an older curmudgeon called Mr Bax (Carleton Hobbs) joins them in the scene, cursing. The stakes get steadily higher when they realise that the mine is flooding. 

Whether it was Hughes’s intention or not, all three characters are enjoyably infuriating, seemingly bent on confirming Sartre’s idea that ‘hell is other people’.

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