Radar: Recent Cultural Picks 17.11.25

Explore Andrew's recent cultural picks. You can read his previous posts here.

The Castle of Otranto, BBC Sounds and Opening Lines, BBC Sounds

I’ve been embracing the seasonal offering on BBC Sounds recently and have listened to three gothic themed dramatisations and one discussion of a key gothic text. I’ll start with The Castle of Otranto, which is as good a place as any, especially when we take into account the fact that it’s often cited as the first gothic text. There are quite a few characters and more twists and turns than a medieval staircase, add to that it's fast paced and you’ve got the recipe for a classic. Coming in at around 190 pages, it’s not a long novel, but listening to this drama, because so much happens in such a short period of time, it has an epic feel about it. The character who played Manfred was excellent in this and played the tyrannical role very convincingly. The actors playing Sir Frederic and Theodore sounded unfortunately similar and if you, like me, found yourself having to take your earphones off for a second it was easy to lose your place very q weekly and get confused between who was whom. But, overall, it can’t be easy decanting 200 pages of a classic novel into 45 minutes of drama, and I thought they did it admirably well here; it was a gripping and authentic version of the story. That was my view, but according to some of the contributors to Opening Lines, an interesting idea for a show where they explore the ideas behind class texts (particularly related to that week’s Drama on 4), the novel is not universally admired with some of the interviewees believing it to be a bit ridiculous in plot. The programme seemed to want to pursue the fact that Walpole, while coming from an aristocratic background, hit on a genre which spoke to everyone. And this is certainly true, for all its flaws, the novel is one that certainly captured the essence the gothic novel. 

And what a genre the gothic is, and is there a better example of it than Matthew Lewis’ 1796 novel The Monk, also abridged for BBC Sounds? I’, currently halfway through this 2 hour feature, but so far it’s excellent and the mysterious character of Ambrosio is played particularly well by Michael Pennington.  

Samhain (BBC Sounds) is another one I’ve been enjoying, set on the island of Jura, where George Orwell also lived for a while. The drama charts a moment in the relationship between David and Claire at the end of October, when the past comes back to haunt her. The actors playing David and Claire have very listenable Scottish accents and bring the script to life - definitely worth 44 minutes of your time.