The man from UNCLE returns with a story from communist Prague
Solo Behind the Iron Curtain Radio 4
I Can See You Radio 3
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive - but to be aged ten in 1968 was very heaven. For a child just beginning to become aware of the world of news, 1968 had it all: an American election, two assassinations, demos in Paris, an Apollo circling the moon and a Soviet invasion. Yet this ten-year-old was also still young enough to be equally excited by The Man from UNCLE, a spy show in which an American and a "good" Russian took on THRUSH, an international terrorist organisation chiefly distinguished for its mass purchase of Renault 4 vans.
UNCLE's man was Napoleon Solo as portrayed by Robert Vaughn. Vaughn is an interesting and politicised man, a friend of Bobby Kennedy who accompanied his widow Ethel on the train journey back to bury him in DC. He wrote a PhD about actors blacklisted by Hollywood during the McCarthy era. I say he is interesting, but when I interviewed him a few years ago to mark his return to British television in Hustle, he was in a morose and unforthcoming mood.
The Welsh actor, writer and director Tracy Spottiswoode clearly got more out of him than I did when she met him. For Afternoon Play (Monday, 5 November, 2.30pm), she expanded an anecdote he must have told her about filming a war movie in Prague in the summer of 1968 into a charming play, Solo Behind the Iron Curtain, starring Vaughn as Himself. With actors George Segal (played here by Robert Glenister) and Ben Gazzara (John Guerrasio), he was making The Bridge at Remagen - described as "for war film buffs" in my video guide. Alexander Dubcek's Prague Spring was overheating by this time, with - to the increasing anxiety of the Soviets - the Czech leader promising the total freedom of press and church, and the right to travel abroad. Soviet tanks that had arrived in May for "military exercises" were still there and looking for excuses to stay. One was the arrival on location of a couple of Hollywood prop tanks.
On 21 August, filming was halted when Vaughn woke up to discover that 5,000 real Soviet tanks had rolled into the capital and he and his mates were trapped. The drama documentary re-enacted their semi-thrilling escape, in which they also smuggled out their interpreter, Pepsi (Vesna Stanojevic). This play posed no intellectual challenge to Tom Stoppard's Rock 'N' Roll, but it had some nice ideas playing around it, among them the thought that Pepsi, as a liberated young woman, might be impervious to Vaughn's already slightly old-fashioned American charm. It was held together by Vaughn's honeyed voice-overs and the thought that in the end, Pepsi, in every sense, won.
Some of the most interesting radio drama - and that is not saying much - can be heard in Radio 3's The Wire on Saturday nights, a slot in which writers new to radio are allowed their head. Sarah Naomi Lee's I Can See You (3 November, 9.30pm) was a meditation on growing up as a mixed-race person in Britain. Narrator Dawn (Nadine Marshall) began: "I've tried black. I've done black to death. It's a lost cause. My sense of rhythm is nonexistent. I can't stand bloody chillies and I am chronically and hopelessly on time. I've tried white too and it is just as bad."
As a child she considered herself beige; a colour reserved, her white mother explained, for carpets not people. As a grown-up she is trapped between the prejudices of her mother who thinks, based on Dawn's father, that black men are terrible and her dim friend who finds her boyfriend Tyrone, the security guard from Primark, so exotic. Her disastrous role model for a black person who is also white is Michael Jackson, whose creepy platitudes punctuate the action.
We hear Dawn preparing for a blind date that turns out to be with her runaway father. He reveals himself to be a shabby little man in ill-fitting trousers. "You're not an African king. You are beige," she thinks, running a mile. Lee's writing was funny and economical. I liked the conceit of Dawn's pedigree Chihuahua, Armitage Shanks, developing alopecia in sympathy with her owner's bad hair year. The play showed, I thought, real promise.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
Pick of the week
Doctor Zhivago
11 November, 3pm, Radio 4
Can Eve Best better Julie Christie as Lara in Jonathan Myerson’s six-part adaptation?
Rockumentary Rollercoaster
13 November, 11.30am, Radio 4
The shock of the rock doc, perhaps.
Vic Reeves’s House Arrest
17 November, 1pm, Radio 2
He can’t get arrested on BBC telly but this is the surreal thing.
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