Nineteen Ninety-four

I've been listening to Nineteen Ninety-four, the dystopian Radio 4 comedy from 1985. Pitched somewhere between HHG, Brave New World and The Prisoner.

What stops it being just another laboured string of Week Ending style 'Sellingfield' gags is Robert Lindsay as the everyman hero Edward Wilson. There's a sequel, Nineteen Ninety-eight, which has David Threlfall instead, and it's not nearly as good. Both Edward Wilsons are complicit in their own exploitation but at least RL's version makes a token resistance.

It's interesting how different NNF (broadcast 1985) and NNE (broadcast 1987) are in tone. They make a fine example of the cultural atmosphere in the two halves of the Eighties. Later 80s concerns about US imperialism and early 80s concerns about riots and everything just falling apart.

Btw I do wonder if Lance Parkin was thinking of NNF when he wrote the scenes with Colin Baker and the personal organiser device in Davros.

Nigel Mole

I've found the original 'Nigel Mole' Thirty Minute Theatre from January 1982. I was never sure whether I'd imagined listening to it or not, but there it was - Adrian is called Nigel just as I remembered, and Nigel is called Adrian.

But that's not all - the opening and closing theme, which even short plays had back then, are from a sort of alternate reality, the one where Carry On films were all scripted by Norman Hudis and never discovered innuendo, where the Pert-shaped time tunnel from the season 11 credits was replaced by a Davo-shaped one when the latter finally took over from Pert in 1982, where Don't Look Back In Anger was capturing the zeitgeist after Callaghan's fourth election victory in 1994.

By which I mean to say, they start with a chorister, singing about being Nigel Mole, and fade into a 'sarcastic teacher' voice berating Nigel Mole for scribbling in his diary, constantly - 'Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday...'. Supposedly the reason Nigel and Adrian swapped roles when the book was published was that the publishers got cold feet about possible confusion with Nigel Molesworth, the goriller of 3B, and having heard that theme, I find that a lot more plausible than I ever did before. Curse of neil armstrong's which is the skool I am at.