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Walter Now (BBC Radio 4 Saturday Play)
Walter Now (BBC Radio 4 Saturday Play)
Nov 17, 2024 10:24 AM

Author:David Cook,Ian McKellen

Walter Now (BBC Radio 4 Saturday Play)

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation starring Sir Ian McKellen, written by David Cook as follow-up to his 1982 Channel 4 social commentary drama, ‘Walter’, about a man with learning difficulties. ‘Walter Now’ was originally broadcast as the ‘Saturday Play’ on 10 January 2009 and repeated on 25 September 2010. In November 1982, Channel 4 launched with David Cook’s ‘Walter’. Now, more than 25 years later, this award-winning writer brings us up to date with Walter's life and Sir Ian McKellen recreates his extraordinary performance. Walter is now a pensioner. Following the death of his mother, Walter spent many years living in a psychiatric hospital. When that was closed down he moved to hostel accommodation where he is isolated and lonely. When his support worker hears of a house share with three others, he suggests Walter. But Walter is twice the age of the rest. Will they accept him? Will he cope with independent living? Will they integrate with the community around them? Also stars Becky Hindley, Malcolm Tierney, Anna-Marie Heslop, Robert Londsdale, Gunnar Cauthery, Edmund Davies, Jill Cardo and Ceallach Spellman. Directed by Claire Grove.

Reviews

The widow of Frank Sinatra delivers the goods in this intimate memoir of their years tiogether... Probing Sinatra's personality, she contrasts his polite manners and loyalty to friends with his feuds and booze-induced rants. Yet in the end, as she sees it, 'Frank was the most romantic man I ever met,' and that feeling permeates the pages throughout.

—— Publishers' Weekly

A remarkable, perhaps even unique, exercise in autobiography ... that aroma of authenticity that is the point of all great autobiographies: of which his, I rather think, is one

—— Evening Standard

Stephen Fry is one of the great originals ... This autobiography of his first twenty years is a pleasure to read, mixing outrageous acts with sensible opinions in bewildering confusion ... That so much outward charm, self-awareness and intellect should exist alongside behaviour that threatened to ruin the lives of innocent victims, noble parents and Fry himself, gives the book a tragic grandeur and lifts it to classic status

—— Financial Times

He writes superbly about his family, about his homosexuality, about the agonies of childhood ... some of his bursts of simile take the breath away ... his most satisfying and appealing book so far

—— Observer

This is one of the most extraordinary and affecting biographies I have read . . . Stephen is . . . painfully honest when trying to grapple with his ever-present demons, and often, as you might expect, very funny

—— Daily Mail

The writing is rhapsodic, intoxicated and very touching

—— Mail on Sunday

[A] wonderful, self-lacerating autobiography

—— Humphrey Carpenter, Sunday Times

He has produced a remarkable autobiography . . . It makes gripping, sometimes unbearably sad, sometimes confusing reading . . . exhilarating, humane, zany, literary

—— Spectator

No one can make you feel quite like Stephen Fry can . . . Funny and tormentedly frank

—— Time Out

Hugely enjoyable . . . compulsively readable . . . Fry is excellent on the details of memory, too, and always able to embellish them with effortless erudition . . . this engaging, engrossing read is as honest a portrait of a young liar as one could hope to read

—— Scotsman

He is bubbly, funny and charming, and he gives his fans plenty of material if they want to speculate on why he is both so gifted and so wayward

—— The Times

The jokes . . . transcend the complexes of the joker, turning the Stephenesque into a national as well as a family treasure

—— Guardian

Not so much an autobiography, more a way of life; discursive, funny, sometimes almost unbelievably sad, opinionated, nostalgic and very infectious

—— Claire Rayner, New Statesman

Fry can be funny about anything

—— Good Book Guide

So charming and so acute that one cannot help forgiving him

—— Daily Express

You need to read this - period

—— Fact
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