Matters of life and death

‘Bait by Cartier,’ she growls as her priceless diamond bracelet is strapped to a piece of rope and dropped overboard in the hope it might lure a fish on to the line. She’s stuck on a boat with a group of survivors after the freighter she was aboard was hit by a German U-boat during the second world war. She was Tallulah Bankhead, playing Connie, heroine of John Steinbeck’s novel-cum-film Lifeboat, for Mystery Theater, the American radio drama series, first broadcast in 1950 and now replayed on Radio 4 Extra (Sunday).

They just don’t make voices like that anymore. It had star quality streaked right through it. That deep husky tone, the raucous laugh, the harsh put-down veering almost at once into a sensual come-on. I was hooked from the first word, even though the dialogue was pretty terrible (‘Some of my best friends are in concentration camps’). The film from which the radio script was taken was made right in the middle of the war and when a survivor from the submarine is brought on to the boat, the anti-German propaganda just gets embarrassing.

But it was so vivid. No question. I could have been sitting on an itchy red velour cinema seat in an old-fashioned double-aisle cinema, watching Bankhead and co tossing on an alien sea. The sound effects were dreadful — great sploshes of water, whirling wind, flapping sails — yet the image of Bankhead, draped in a mink coat, tapping out her latest report for her newspaper, was so immediate, so compelling.

It was vintage, in both senses. Incredibly old-school yet at the same time a classic example of radio theatre, the drama all conveyed in the voice, the interaction between the characters, and in this case the sweeping strings of the soundtrack.