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PODCAST

Opening Lines

Producer and writer John Yorke has worked in television and radio for 30 years, and he shares his experience with Radio 4 listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact behind the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in Radio 4"s weekend afternoon dramas.

arts books

All Episodes

14:35

Spring Awakening - Episode 1

Opening Lines ·

2025/02/23

John Yorke examines the radical 1891 play Spring Awakening by German dramatist Frank Wedekind. A cautionary, nightmarish portrait of teenage angst and rebellion against oppressive social structures and family pressures, the play’s explicit content was so shocking that it was not performed for 15 years after its publication. In the decades since, it has often been cut or censored. Wedekind’s original play became the inspiration for a 2006 hit Broadway musical of the same name. In this first of two

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14:19

That Hideous Strength - Episode 1

Opening Lines ·

2025/02/09

John Yorke looks at CS Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength, the third in a trilogy of science fiction works. Published in the aftermath of the Second World War, it offers a bleak vision of a world where unchecked scientific research is masking much more sinister aims. A couple, Jane and Mark Studdock, are set on different paths, both threatened by external and internal forces on a dark journey into a dystopian future.In this episode, John examines the key themes in That Hideous Strength and finds

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14:27

That Hideous Strength - Episode 2

Opening Lines ·

2025/02/09

John Yorke looks at C.S Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength, the third in a trilogy of science fiction works. Published in the aftermath of World War Two it offers a bleak vision of a world where unchecked scientific research is masking much more sinister aims. A couple, Jane and Mark Studdock, are set on different paths, both threatened by external and internal forces on a dark journey into a dystopian nightmare.In the second of two episodes, John looks at the context in which That Hideous Strength

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14:31

The History of Mr Polly

Opening Lines ·

2025/01/26

Ian Sansom, sitting in for John Yorke, takes a look at The History of Mr Polly, the satirical novel by HG Wells. Published in 1910, it tells a story of one man’s comic, sometimes poignant struggle to find his place in the world. Mr Polly is an ordinary man, with an irrepressible longing for the extraordinary - a man caught in a frustratingly mundane world who finally and magnificently rebels against it. The dreamer mired in the mundane world of a draper’s shop has become a classic, much-loved

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14:27

The Plague

Opening Lines ·

2025/01/19

John Yorke looks at Albert Camus’ classic, The Plague. Published in 1947 it’s often thought to be an allegory for the Nazi occupation of Paris where Camus was living during the war. But the huge rise in its popularity during the pandemic speaks to the book’s enduring appeal. A seemingly simple narrative is actually a complex and layered exploration of how man responds to tragedy and finds meaning in an essentially meaningless world. Professor Andrew Hussey and Dr Raj Persaud contribute their

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14:22

Behind the Scenes at the Museum - Episode 2

Opening Lines ·

2025/01/05

John Yorke examines Kate Atkinson’s 1995 Whitbread award-winning debut Behind the Scenes at the Museum. An epic tragi-comedy, the novel tells the story of protagonist Ruby Lennox, who is born above a family pet shop in York in the early 1950s and grows up in post-war Britain. Through Ruby, the reader is transported back and forth through the centuries as she recounts the stories of four generations of her family from the 1800s to the mid-1990s. Behind the Scenes at the Museum was the first in a

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14:13

Behind the Scenes at the Museum - Episode 1

Opening Lines ·

2025/01/05

John Yorke examines Kate Atkinson’s 1995 Whitbread award-winning debut Behind the Scenes at the Museum. An epic tragi-comedy, the novel tells the story of protagonist Ruby Lennox, who is born above a family pet shop in York in the early 1950s and grows up in post-war Britain. Through Ruby, the reader is transported back and forth through the centuries as she recounts the stories of four generations of her family from the 1800s to the mid-1990s. In this episode, John looks at how a debut novel from a

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14:37

Miss Happiness and Miss Flower

Opening Lines ·

2024/12/29

In the series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work, John Yorke takes a look at Rumer Godden’s children’s book Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, with the help of Dame Jacqueline Wilson.We meet two tiny Japanese dolls - Miss Happiness and Miss Flower – delivered as a Christmas present. They are strangers in a strange land, subject to social forces and customs they don’t recognise, desperately trying to find a way to fit in. The same is true of Nona – the eight-year-old

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14:36

Christmas Pudding

Opening Lines ·

2024/12/22

John Yorke looks at Nancy Mitford’s depiction of the lives and loves of the English upper classes as a group of friends and acquaintances gather in the Cotswolds for Christmas. It’s a sharply observed, mostly gentle, satire of the aristocratic type that Mitford herself knew so well. This was her second novel, written in 1932. She became, and remains, famous for her subsequent bestsellers The Pursuit of Love in 1945 and Love in a Cold Climate in 1949 but Christmas Pudding shows very clearly the

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14:12

The Girl of the Sea of Cortez

Opening Lines ·

2024/12/08

John Yorke looks at Peter Benchley’s environmentally themed novel The Girl of the Sea of Cortez.Peter Benchley is best known for his debut novel Jaws which become a huge global bestseller when it was published in 1974 and was further seared into the public consciousness by Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation the following year. His next two novels – The Deep and The Island – were also thrillers set at sea. However, Benchley’s attitude to the oceans and the creatures that live in them underwent a

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14:29

The Lay of the Land

Opening Lines ·

2024/11/24

The Lay of the Land, by the American novelist Richard Ford, is the third of what became a series of five books about Frank Bascombe. Now in his mid-50s, Frank has left sports writing behind and works in real estate in coastal New Jersey. But life is not settled - Frank is in remission from cancer and, previously divorced, his new marriage is facing problems of its own and relations with his grown-up children are under strain. Also, the dispute over the result of the US presidential election, between

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14:29

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Opening Lines ·

2024/11/17

As we approach its hundredth anniversary, John Yorke explores the long-vanished world of German writer Alfred Döblin’s Expressionist masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Set in 1928 at the height of the Weimar Republic, the novel centres around Franz Biberkopf - ‘transport worker, housebreaker, pimp, manslaughterer’ - who is determined to go straight following his release from prison. Weather reports, tales from scripture, popular songs, death tolls, recipes and advertising slogans continuously

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14:29

Our Mutual Friend - Episode 2

Opening Lines ·

2024/11/10

“I have made up my mind that I must have money,” says the character Bella Wilfer in Charles Dickens’ last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend – and she is one of many characters in the book for whom “money, money, money, and what money can make of life” is an overriding concern. Dickens was deeply concerned with the increasing levels of inequality he saw around him in 1860s London, a city at the heart of the largest and richest empire in the world. In Our Mutual Friend he presents characters trapped

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14:33

Our Mutual Friend - Episode 1

Opening Lines ·

2024/11/03

Our Mutual Friend was the last novel that Charles Dickens completed, and was written at a point of significant turmoil in the author’s personal life. It's a hugely ambitious and sophisticated novel, drawing the wild complexities of 1860s London life into its purview and marrying realism with mythic symbolism to great effect. Identities shift, deception battles unceasingly with the truth, while the great River Thames continues to flow. John Yorke attempts to bring shape and light to this disparate,

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14:44

Little Dorrit - Episode 1

Opening Lines ·

2024/10/13

Little Dorrit, written by Charles Dickens in the 1850s, is among the author’s most ambitious novels containing a massive sweep of themes, characters and locations. At its heart though is the confined space of the Marshalsea Debtors Prison, where the blameless Amy Dorrit chooses to live with her incarcerated father William, who takes pride in being the longest serving prisoner in the place. In the first of two episodes focusing on the novel, John Yorke describes how the deeply personal events from

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14:38

Little Dorrit - Episode 2

Opening Lines ·

2024/10/13

Little Dorrit, written by Charles Dickens in the 1850s, is among the author’s most ambitious novels containing a massive sweep of themes, characters and locations. It may be set 30 years before its creation, but the book feels in many ways ahead of its time, exploring themes of freedom and entrapment – both physical and psychological – in ways that would appeal enormously to later figures including Kafka and Tchaikovsky, who regarded it as such a work of genius that he forgave Dickens for being an

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14:32

Hard Times - Episode 2

Opening Lines ·

2024/10/02

Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times is perhaps best known for its portrayal of school inspector Thomas Gradgrind, who states clearly and repeatedly at the outset that it’s facts that matter, and education should be all about filling children up with these facts as if they were vessels rather than human beings. In this, the second of two episodes introducing Hard Times, John Yorke looks at how Dickens demonstrates the damage that Gradgrind’s utilitarian approach can have on real people, and offers in

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14:25

Hard Times - Episode 1

Opening Lines ·

2024/10/02

Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times is set in a northern factory town at the height of the industrial revolution, far away from the writer’s normal stamping ground of London - but it certainly doesn’t lack the overlapping plots, the wide array of characters and the incorporation of melodrama, humour and tragedy that we associate so closely with the author. Dickens had travelled north himself as a journalist to cover a cotton strike in Preston and seen first hand the various ways in which the factory

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14:30

Robinson Crusoe

Opening Lines ·

2024/09/22

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, is one of the most well-known and influential pieces of writing in Western literature. Initially presented as a true account, this tale of adventure, desert island shipwrecking and survival has been re-told and re-packaged for different audiences, different generations and different times - rom The Swiss Family Robinson to Lost In Space, and Lord of the Flies to Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway. The term ‘Robinsonade’ was even coined to identify the

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14:04

Clear Light of Day - Episode 2

Opening Lines ·

2024/08/25

Set in the turbulent years of 20th century India, Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day brings us a story of family and political upheaval in the blistering heat of Old Delhi. John Yorke unpicks the threads that hold both family and community together until they fray and fall apart. From an opening in the 1980s we are taken backwards and forwards in time to find loyalties and tensions amongst siblings set against the backdrop of India’s turbulent history. The most significant event for India was

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