2022 spy-jinks audio drama by Julian Simpson. Clara Page is an agent
set to track down the Themis Group, a criminal conspiracy so powerful
nobody's even heard of it.
Although it's set in the modern day, this is very much in the
1960s spy-fi tradition: not so much James Bond, but perhaps in the
halo that grew up in reaction to it. The theme tune recalls The
IPCRESS File and The Avengers, and the spirit of fun that was a
core part of the latter is very much a theme here. When preparing
explosives:
You're asking me to empty out bottles of Chateau d'Yquem?
I took the liberty of selecting the poorer vintages, sir.
The format of five half-hour episodes leaves things feeling quite
cramped: there's a beginning and an ending, of sorts, but it's clear
that many things have happened before the tape started to roll and
many more will happen afterwards. A change of location may be summed
up in one line. But it's the larger scaffolding that suffers, and that
can mostly be remedied by attentive listening; the individual scenes
work very well.
There are also strong connections to earlier Simpson material,
particularly The Lovecraft Investigations; I think a new listener
would not be completely lost, and in any case Simpson resists the
temptation to explain too much. Certainly there are ongoing themes of
the untrustworthiness of memory (but then what do you use instead?),
but a villainous monologue is talked over by the good guys deciding
what to do next, and that's worth many points in itself.
Available, at least for the moment, on BBC
Sounds.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.