The crew of a spaceship retrieving a valuable ore from an abandoned mining operation on a mysterious planet encountered an intelligent life form in Mike Walker’s hour-long The Saturday Play: Landfall.
Radio 4’s Weird Tales returned for four new episodes, while Beasts on the Lawn: Saki 2011 featured updated dramatisations of five stories by Edwardian author Saki (H. H. Munro), set in a gated community and linked by security guard Clovis (Pippa Haywood).
Filmed twice by director George Slulzer, The Vanishing was an hour-long radio dramatisation in July of Tim Krabbe’s The Golden Egg, about a man attempting to discover what happened to his missing girlfriend.
Dramatised by Brian Sibley in six one-hour episodes to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mervyn Peake, The History of Titus Groan encompassed the entire Gormenghast trilogy and the epilogue written by his widow, with a cast that included David Warner, Miranda Richardson, Tamsin Greig and William Gaunt.
As part of the morning fifteen-minute Woman’s Hour Drama slot, Kiss Kiss presented five macabre stories by Roald Dahl, dramatised by Stephen Sheridan. Each episode starred Charles Dance, supported by a cast that included Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup and John Baddeley.
In May, The Doll: Short Stories by Daphne du Maurier featured abridged readings of three stories by the author of The Birds, while Summer Ghosts in August presented readings of three fifteen-minute spooky tales set in daylight written by Sophie Hannah, Louise Welsh and Adam Thorpe.
David Tennant returned to Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime with A Night with a Vampire 2, for which he read fifteen minute adaptations of “The Lady of the House of Love” by Angela Carter, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” by Fritz Leiber, “Bewitched” by Edith Wharton, “Drink My Blood” by Richard Matheson and “A Lot of Mince Pies” by Robert Swindells.
In the same slot, Derek Jacobi read Anthony Horowitz’s Sherlock Holmes pastiche The House of Silk over ten nights in early November. Meanwhile, James Fleet played Inspector Lestrade, who introduced four half-hour episodes of The Rivals, featuring other fictional detectives of the period. The weekly series kicked off with an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” starring Andrew Scott as C. Auguste Dupin.
In April, BBC Radio 7 was re-branded BBC Radio 4 Extra. Jonathan Morris’ four-part Doctor Who: Cobwebs reunited fifth Doctor Peter Davison with companions Turlough, Tegan and Nyssa in an abandoned gene-tech facility, and their adventures continued in Stephen Cole’s Doctor Who: The Whispering Forest and Marc Platt’s Doctor Who: The Cradle of the Snake.
Meanwhile, Doctor Who: The Hornet’s Nest featured fourth Doctor Tom Baker in three two-part adventures (“The Stuff of Nightmares”, “The Dead Shoes” and “The Circus of Doom”) scripted by Paul Magrs.
The Horror at Bly was Neville Teller’s response to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, while actor Richard Coyle read H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness over five half-hour episodes on successive nights in June.
Don Webb’s four-part dramatisation of Elidor updated Alan Garner’s 1965 novel for a new audience of younger listeners.
In mid-September, Radio 4 Extra broadcast half-hour productions of “The Captain of the Polestar” by Arthur Conan Doyle, “Olalia” by Robert Louis Stevenson and “The Brownie of the Black Haggs” by James Hogg under the umbrella title The Darker Side of the Border.
Mark Gattis returned to introduce new half-hour episodes of The Man in Black on the same station in October, including “Lights Out” by Christopher Golden and Amber Benson.
Radio 4 Extra celebrated Halloween with a selection of Gothic tales from the archive that included an adaptation of Loren D. Estleman’s Sherlock Holmes v Dracula, a reading of Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost, a reading of Tanya Huff’s “Quid Pro Quo” as part of A Short History of Vampires, and a forty-five minute adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla starring Anne-Marie Duff, Celia Imrie, David Warner and Brana Bajic in the title role.
Each evening during the same week, Haunting Women presented five fifteen- minute supernatural tales by Dermot Bolger, while Benjamin Whitrow read Ghost Stories by M. R. James.
Christopher Lee’s Fireside Tales was a fifteen-minute series broadcast over Christmas in which the veteran actor read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”, Jerome K. Jerome’s “The Man of Science”, E. Nesbit’s “John Charrington’s Wedding”, Ambrose Bierce’s “The Man and the Snake” and W. W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw”.
In October, BBC Radio 3’s Opera on 3 broadcast Opera North’s new version of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, featuring soprano Dame Josephine Barstow as the mysterious old Countess.
BBC Radio 2 celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the musical Phantom of the Opera with The Phantom Phenomenon in November. Lyricist Don Black talked to composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and others about their involvement in the longest-running Broadway musical of all time, which is estimated to have grossed $5.6 billion to date around the world.
Described as a “historical-shtetl-magic-realist-feminist-musical audio drama”, The Witches of Lublin premiered on New York radio stations WBAI and WNYC in April. Co-scripted and introduced by Ellen Kushner, the broadcast included Neil Gaiman amongst the voice cast.
Broadcast on Radio 4 in February, The Priest, the Badger and the Little Green Men from Mars was Rob Alexander’s half-hour profile of prolific genre writer-turned-reverend [Robert] Lionel Fanthorpe, who contributed readings from his own work.
Comedy broadcaster Natalie Haynes investigated the modern fascination with blood-drinkers and the walking dead in Radio 4’s half-hour Vampires v Zombies, while in the two-part Cat Women of the Moon on the same station, novelist Sarah Hook looked at how the SF genre pushes the boundaries of sex with the help of China Mieville, Iain Banks, Nicola Griffith and Robert Winston.
Hosted by The League of Gentlemen writer and actor Jeremy Dyson, The Unsettled Dust: The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman was a half-hour reappraisal of the author’s work, broadcast on Radio 4 in December.
The CD box set of Tales from Beyond the Pale: Season 1 was hosted by Larry Fessenden and included audio plays featuring Vincent D’Onofrio and Ron Perlman.
The “curse of Spider-Man” continued when actress T. V. Carpio, who took over the role of the evil Arachne after the original actress suffered a concussion, was forced to pull out of the $65 million Broadway show Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark in March following an injury sustained during an on-stage battle.
Following a series of accidents, multiple missed opening dates and a critical lambasting, controversial director and co-writer Julie Taymor was relieved of her day-to-day duties by producers the same month, and the troubled production shut down for more than three weeks as a new team was brought in to re-imagine the show. It finally opened in June to mostly unenthusiastic reviews.
Five months later, former director Taymor reportedly sued the producers of the show for $1 million compensation, claiming they had “violated her creative rights”.
Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller alternated as Frankenstein and his Creature in Nick Dear’s new adaptation of Frankenstein for director Danny Boyle, which premiered at London’s National Theatre’s Olivier in February.
Anita Dobson and Greta Scacchi portrayed Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, respectively, during the making of the 1962 movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in Anton Burge’s Bette and Joan, which opened at London’s Arts Theatre in May.
That same month, Terry Gilliam directed Hector Berlioz’s opera The Damnation of
