Showing results by narrator "Joanna Scanlan" in All Categories

Mattie is a woman with a thrilling past and a chafingly uneventful present. During the Women’s Suffrage Campaign she was a militant. Jailed five times, she marched, sang, gave speeches, smashed windows and heckled Winston Churchill, and nothing - nothing - since then has had the same depth, the same excitement. Now in middle age, she is still looking for a fresh mould into which to pour her energies. 

The Emperor Domitian has informers everywhere; no-one is safe. He rules Rome with a rod of iron, and he is dangerously unstable and paranoid. In the snake pit of Imperial Rome, all Pliny the Younger wants to do is get his letters ready for publication. Except if he, his mother, their Greek cook Doris (who narrowly missed out on becoming the next Oracle at Delphi), and Venta, their slave with secretarial skills, have any chance of surveying, they are going to have to negotiate a political minefield, keep their eyes peeled for spies and, most of all, not do anything to annoy the Emperor.

In 1998, BBC Radio 4 found it had a new star on its hands. From the opening monologue ("You see when the boys in the playground found out that I had a potentially fatal allergy to peanuts, they used to shove me up against a wall and make me play Russian roulette with a bag of Revels") to the closing number ("Milton Jones, Milton Jones, so good they named him"), everything about the show was different, weird, and funny.

Faye Walters knows that today's women are sorted and stylish. They have the job, the house, the colour co-ordinated capsule wardrobe. They cope with the pressures of singledom, marriage and having kids with peanut allergies. And they all do it effortlessly, with nothing more than a women's mag and a poem by Pam Ayres to guide them. So why can't she pull it off?