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BBC Radio 4

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.

Opening Lines

Jane Austen’s novel, Northanger Abbey, was the first full book she wrote. She was in her early 20s at the time and it was accepted by a publisher but the novel wasn’t published in her lifetime. In this second episode John Yorke looks at the story behind the genesis of Northanger Abbey - how a young woman with only three years of formal education came to write such an accomplished work, what prompted her to write a satire of Gothic fiction, and why the book is also a hymn of praise to the novel form itself.

Jane may not have spent much time in school but her voracious love of reading, her prodigious memory and understanding of other writers’ techniques meant that she was entertaining the family with her own stories and plays from an early age. After leaving school at 11, her real education began - self-education. With the encouragement of her father, the availability of subscription libraries which made reading possible for all purses, and a lot of writing practice, she would develop into one of Britain’s finest writers.

Sadly, her story is also one of disappointment and neglect. Despite the publisher’s promise, Jane’s novel, finished when she was 24, would have to languish for nearly 20 years before it finally saw the light of day, six months after her death.

John Yorke has worked in television and radio for 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy, he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative - including many podcasts for R4.

Contributors: Emma Clery, Literary Critic and Cultural Historian, Professor of English Literature at the Uppsala University, Sweden, and author of Jane Austen: The Banker’s Sister.

Rebecca Romney, author of Jane Austen’s Bookshelf.

Reader: Esme Scarborough
Production Hub Coordinators: Nina Semple, Dawn Williams
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Sound: Iain Hunter
Producer: Kate McAll
Executive Producer: Sara Davies

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

Northanger Abbey - Episode Two

Northanger Abbey was Jane Austen’s first book, although it wasn’t published until after her death. It tells the story of Catherine Morland, an impressionable young woman who is introduced to fashionable society when she’s taken by a wealthy neighbour to Bath. There, Catherine’s imagination catches fire when she’s initiated into the thrills of Gothic fiction by new friend, Isabella Thorpe – a pretty, charming but devious gold digger.

Another great reader of Gothic novels is ‘not quite handsome but very near it’ Henry Tilney, whom Catherine finds enchanting. When Henry invites Catherine to stay at Northanger Abbey, the home of his father, General Tilney, she imagines secret passages, haunted catacombs and an evil secret. Catherine does indeed find something wicked at the Abbey but not in the way she expects.

In this first of two episodes John Yorke explores the dual nature of the book - part satire on Gothic fiction and part celebration of the novel form.

John Yorke has worked in television and radio for 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy, he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative - including many podcasts for R4.

Contributors: Emma Clery, Literary Critic and Cultural Historian, Professor of English Literature at the Uppsala University, Sweden, and author of Jane Austen: The Banker’s Sister.

Rebecca Romney, author of Jane Austen’s Bookshelf.

Reader: Esme Scarborough
Production Hub Coordinators: Nina Semple and Dawn Williams
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Sound: Iain Hunter
Producer: Kate McAll
Executive Producer: Sara Davies

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

Northanger Abbey - Episode One

When Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto in 1764, novels as a form were still in their infancy. Many tended to be long-winded works, instructing readers on how to live a moral life. 

With this short and fast-paced rollercoaster of a book, Walpole blew that idea out of the water, introducing his audience to a completely new kind of fiction, featuring supernatural happenings, suspense, and a young woman fleeing an evil villain down a dark corridor with a candle that blows out at the vital moment - all the elements of what we now call Gothic fiction. 

Prompting both a moral panic and a rush on sales, The Castle of Otranto would prove inspirational to many future writers, including Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein and Jane Austen who would both parody and celebrate the Gothic in her novel Northanger Abbey.

John Yorke has worked in television and radio for 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy, he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative - including many podcasts for R4.

Contributor: Emma Clery, Professor of English Literature at the Uppsala University, Sweden. Editor of The Castle of Otranto (1996), and author of The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762 -1800

Reader: Paul Dodgson 
Production Hub Coordinator: Nina Semple 
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Sound: Iain Hunter 
Producer: Kate McAll 
Executive Producer: Sara Davies

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

The Castle of Otranto

In the winter of 1847, the Star of the Sea sets sail from Ireland for New York. Among the refugees are a maidservant, a bankrupt aristocrat, an aspiring novelist and a maker of revolutionary ballads. It reads like a Victorian gothic novel, with murder and intrigue at its heart.

Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor was published in 2002 and attracted multiple plaudits as well as literary awards. O’Connor talks about the shocked response from his publishers when he proposed writing a novel about the Irish Famine and we learn how real facts are woven skilfully into fiction.

Novelist Colm Tóibín explains how there are elements of pastiche in Star of the Sea and how it’s written like a 19th century novel. He also states that, at a time when the Irish narrative was being re-imagined, even the great Irish playwrights such as Sean O’Casey didn’t write about the Famine.

At the heart of the story is the threatening figure of Pius Mulvey – the balladeer and adventurer. Known as ‘The Monster’, Mulvey stalks the decks of the ship like some kind of embodiment of the tragedy that has overtaken the old country. We hear about the tragic and human stories within this novel into which O’Connor is also able weave humour and a propulsive narrative.

John Yorke explains that the skill of this novel is that, with the aid of eyewitness accounts, historical documents, letters home, passenger manifests and Captain’s logs, O’Connor unravels the extraordinary relationships at the book’s heart by re-stitching them into a grander tapestry – that of a terrible horror, long hidden, central to a nation’s heart.

John Yorke has worked in television and radio for 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy, he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative - including many podcasts for R4.

Contributor: 
Colm Tóibín, bestselling writer

Extracts from:
The Arts Show, BBC Radio Ulster with Marie Louise Muir, 16 August 2007
Reading from Star of the Sea by Peter Marinker, from the audiobook of the same title published by W.F. Howes Ltd, 2011

Star of the Sea published in 2002 by Secker and Warburg

Sound: Sean Kerwin
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Hub Coordinator: Nina Semple
Producer: Belinda Naylor
Executive Producer: Caroline Raphael

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

Star of the Sea

John Yorke looks at the background to A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and assesses the appeal of this worldwide best seller by Marina Lewycka. Two feuding sisters unite to thwart their newly widowed father’s impending marriage to Valentina - a voluptuous gold-digger from Ukraine who loves green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine and who’ll stop at nothing in her single-minded pursuit of the luxurious Western lifestyle she dreams of.

John Yorke has worked in television and radio for 30 years and shares his experience with Radio 4 listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy, he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative - including many podcasts for R4.

Contributor: 
Professor Andrew Wilson, Professor of Ukrainian studies at University College London and author of ‘The Ukrainians’

Archive:
Radio 4 – Marina Lewycka on 'Book Club', 8th January 2015

Readings from A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian: Marina Lewycka (Penguin Essentials, 71), 2017

Reader: Janet Ellis
Producer: Alison Vernon-Smith
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Researcher Henry Tydeman
Production Hub Coordinator: Nina Semple
Executive Producer: Caroline Raphael

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

John Yorke looks at The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov’s final play and a landmark in 20th century theatre.

It’s 1903 and Liubov Andryeevna Ranyevskaya has returned to the family estate in southern Russia. As the head of this aristocratic household she faces a dilemma. The family is in serious financial difficulty and they have the choice of either selling the entire estate, or accepting the proposal of local businessman, Lopakhin, to cut down their beloved cherry orchard to make way for holiday homes and use the money to pay their debts. 

In the second of two episodes, John looks at how Chekhov’s use of ambiguity, his skilful combination of comic and tragic elements, and his rejection of naturalism represent a departure from his previous work and were to prove so influential in the development of 20th century theatre.

John has worked in television and radio for 30 years, and shares his experience with Radio 4 listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative, including many podcasts for Radio 4.

Contributors:
Simon Russell Beale, whose long and distinguished acting career has seen him play many roles, including his performance as Lopakhin in a 2009 production of The Cherry Orchard at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He also won an Olivier Award for his performance as Uncle Vanya in 2003.
Rosamund Bartlett, a cultural historian with expertise in Russian literature, music, and art. Her books include Chekhov: Scenes from a Life and she has also translated and edited selections of his stories and letters.
Benedict Andrews, director of an acclaimed production of The Cherry Orchard at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 2024.

Reader: Torquil MacLeod
Closing music: Torquil MacLeod
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Hub Coordinator: Nina Semple 
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Executive Producer: Sara Davies

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

The Cherry Orchard - Episode Two

John Yorke looks at The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov’s final play and a landmark in 20th century theatre.

It’s 1903 and Liubov Andryeevna Ranyevskaya is returning to the family estate in southern Russia. As the head of this aristocratic household, she faces a crisis. The family is in serious financial difficulty and it seems inevitable that the estate will have to be sold to pay their debts. A local businessman, Lopakhin, offers a solution, but it would mean the loss of their beloved cherry orchard. 

In this first of two episodes, the focus is on these two main protagonists, who embody the tensions between the old aristocracy and the emerging merchant class, and the student Trofimov whose revolutionary ideas point prophetically towards the path that Russia was soon to take.

John has worked in television and radio for 30 years, and shares his experience with Radio 4 listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative, including many podcasts for R4.

Contributors:
Benedict Andrews, director of an acclaimed production of The Cherry Orchard at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 2024
Rosamund Bartlett, a cultural historian with expertise in Russian literature, music and art. Her books include Chekhov: Scenes from a Life and she has also translated and edited selections of his stories and letters.

Excerpt taken from the BBC Radio 3/Palimpsest production of The Cherry Orchard, directed by Toby Swift, with Neil Dudgeon as Lopakhin and Saffron Coomber as Dunyasha. It was first broadcast on Radio 3 on 18th November 2018.

Music: Torquil MacLeod
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Hub Coordinator: Nina Semple 
Producer: Torquil MacLeod 
Executive Producer: Sara Davies

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

The Cherry Orchard - Episode One

Charles Darwin’s ideas changed our understanding of the world perhaps more than those of any other British scholar. His famous voyage on HMS Beagle ended in 1836, and he had developed his findings into his theories on evolution and natural selection within six years. It was not, however, until 1859 that he shared these revolutionary ideas with the public in On The Origin of Species, a book far different to the one he had intended to write. 

In this episode of Opening Lines, John Yorke examines what finally led Darwin to write this pioneering work of popular science, and the impact it had upon his contemporaries. 

The programme features evolutionary biologist Dr Tori Herridge of the University of Sheffield. 

John has worked in television and radio for 30 years, and shares his experience with Radio 4 listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative, including many podcasts for Radio 4.

Clip of Andrew Marr from ‘Great Britons: Darwin’ BBC2 (2002)

Sound: Sean Kerwin
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Hub Coordinator: Nina Semple
Producer: Geoff Bird
Reader: Paul Dodgson
Executive Producer: Caroline Raphael

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

On the Origin of Species

John Yorke looks at Treasure Island, the great swash-buckling adventure by Robert Louis Stevenson that inspired almost every pirate tale to follow. 

Stevenson wrote the story to amuse his stepson on a wet holiday in the Scottish Highlands, with the original title The Sea Cook. Looking back at his time as a boy, narrator Jim Hawkins recounts his thrilling adventures on land and at sea in the pursuit of buried treasure, and we discover that the sea cook is none other than archetypal pirate Long John Silver, one-legged and with a parrot on his shoulder, one of Stevenson’s great literary creations.

John Yorke argues that Treasure Island has a profound and lasting impact even in the age of Minecraft, Reality TV and YouTube length dramas, and in this episode of Opening Lines he will explain why.

John Yorke has worked in television and radio for 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy, he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative - including many podcasts for R4.

Contributor:
Louise Welsh, author and Professor of Creative Writing, Glasgow University

Extracts from:
Michael Morpurgo, Twice Upon a Time podcast produced by Hat Trick Productions Ltd, 2022
Claire Harman, BBC Radio 4’s Great Lives, 2005

Reader: Crawford Logan
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Hub Coordinator: Nina Semple
Producer: Mark Rickards
Executive Producer: Caroline Raphael

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

Treasure Island

In the months that followed the end of the Second World War, very few people in the West knew the true power of the atomic weaponry that had forced the Japanese surrender. John Hersey’s article Hiroshima would change that.

Released a year after the bombs were dropped, the New Yorker piece was journalistic dynamite and sold out in hours. Published in one instalment - taking up the whole edition of the magazine - Hersey’s meticulous and unflinching account of what happened after the atom bomb detonated brought home the horror of atomic weaponry to the world and changed journalism in the process. 

John Yorke speaks to Janine di Giovanni, award winning war reporter and founder of The Reckoning Project (a war crimes unit that operates in Ukraine and the Middle East) about how pivotal the article was and how it impacts her work today.

John has worked in television and radio for 30 years, and shares his experience with listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative, including many podcasts for R4.

Contributors:
Janine di Giovanni, war reporter and founder of The Reckoning Project.
David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker
John Hersey, author

Archive: 
The David Remnick audio, and the John Hersey interview (taken from the American Audio Prose Library interview conducted by Kay Bonetti Callison, 1988) were both originally broadcast as part of Hersey’s Hiroshima produced by Dora Productions Ltd, BBC Radio 4 2016.

Reader: Riley Neldam
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Hub Coordinator: Nina Semple
Producer: Tolly Robinson
Executive Producer: Sara Davies

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

Hiroshima

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness remains one of the most enigmatic works of 19th Century literature, charting as it does the story of Marlow, the captain of a steamboat heading up an unnamed river in the employ of an unnamed organisation described simply ‘the Company’. He becomes fixated on tracking down the figure of Kurtz, a company agent in charge of a trading post - but this is no action adventure so typical of the time. John asks what the phrase Heart of Darkness - and Kurtz’s famous epigram ‘The horror. The horror’ might actually represent, and also attempts to reconcile the racism many critics have accused the book of containing with its staunch attack on imperial barbarity; Conrad himself had previously worked on a boat going up the Congo river where he witnessed for himself the atrocities carried out by the Belgian colonisers on the local people. 

John Yorke has worked in television and radio for thirty years, and he shares his experience with Radio 4 listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatized in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. From EastEnders to the Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless, he has been obsessed with telling big popular stories. He has spent years analysing not just how stories work but why they resonate with audiences around the globe and has brought together his experience in his bestselling book ‘Into the Woods’. As former Head of Channel Four Drama, Controller of BBC Drama Production and MD of Company Pictures, John has tested his theories during an extensive production career working on some of the world’s most lucrative, widely viewed and critically acclaimed TV drama. As founder of the hugely successful BBC Writers Academy John has trained a generation of screenwriters (his students have had 17 green-lights in the last two years alone). 

Contributors:
Anita Sullivan - writer and adapter of ‘Heart of Darkness’ 
Maya Jasanoff, Professor of History at Harvard University - and author of the much acclaimed book ‘The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World’

Credits:
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, 1899 

Reader: Paul Dodgson
Researcher: Nina Semple
Production Manager: Sarah Wright
Producer: Geoff Bird
Executive Producer: Sara Davies

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4

Heart of Darkness

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