Sunday 24 July 2011

TITUS TIMES

The Radio Times are still making up for their earlier lack of coverage of The History of Titus Groan with wonderful, praise-laden coverage of the kind of which writer's dreams are made.

Here's their latest preview for this afternoon's broadcast on Radio 4 at 15:00...

Titus Today's Choice

In the third play, Titus – no longer an infant but now ten years old – is beginning to discover for himself the strange secrets of his ancestral home of Gormenghast.

The young Titus is played by Hugo Docking, seen here (right) with Luke Treadaway who plays the grown-up Titus and narrator of his history...

Titus x Two

We also follow the continued rise of Steerpike, played by Carl Prekopp, as (seen below) he arranges for the removal of the Gerard McDermott's Master of Ritual, Barquentine...

Steerpike and Barquentine

All of the episodes, as they are broadcast, will remain accessible via the BBC iPlayer until the series is complete. Then, eight days later, it will be possible to download and purchase all six hours of drama for limitless listening!

The Radio Times artwork of Steerpike is by the exciting illustrator, Kevin Hauff who writes of his picture:
...A gift of a project. I thought it best to concentrate on Steerpike and his murderous intent. For me, he's by far the most interesting character in the book(s) as he's so calculating and unrelentingly evil.


A true villain in the best theatrical sense. His ambition to be part of the castle life and hierarchy is all consuming and I thought it would be interesting to depict him overlapping into the walls of Gormenghast itself...

Read Kevin's full blog-post, here and be sure to check out his portfolios of illustrations on his web-site

And, if you haven't stumbled across it yet, here I am enthusing about radio drama...




Images: Art by Kevin Hauff, © 2011; Photos: Islay Bell-Webb

1 comment:

Boll Weavil said...

Despite the fact that Radio Times is one of the few listings magazines to give house room to radio, it still seems suprised when a big series comes along that knock spots off TV drama. Why ? For me, radio has consistantly had comparable players, writers, effects and everything else.The Radiophonic Workshop is an example of the bottomless pool of talent and imagination available to the genre and yet it was closed.Hope I'm not part of the last generation brought up on radio as my prime source of inspiration entertainment.