One Foot in the Radio Theatre

In what we can only presume was late 1994, David Renwick adapted four episodes of One Foot in the Grave for the radio, which proceeded to be broadcast in 1995 in what seems a rather curious timeslot: Saturdays at 1.30pm on Radio 2, weekly from the 21st January. Perhaps because of this, these adaptations seem to have become a little obscure for some time, only receiving the most fleeting of mentions in Richard Webber's remarkably thorough book, The Complete One Foot in the Grave (noting the episodes' subsequent release on cassette and CD in the 'Merchandise' section), although the advent of BBC Radio 7, latterly Radio 4 Extra, allowed for many subsequent repeats, and they've more recently seen a special vinyl release "housed in an illustrated wide-spine outer sleeve -- complete with coffee-spilled rear".

Of the four episodes Renwick chose to adapt, two were bottle episodes, namely "Timeless Time" -- an episode that never leaves the Meldrews' bedroom in the middle of the night and features only Victor and Margaret -- and "The Beast in the Cage". As you might imagine, these episodes required little to no changes for the new medium, and even the other two -- the very first episode, "Alive and Buried", and the first episode of the second series, "In Luton Airport No-One Can Hear You Scream" -- have very few differences. Nowhere is this illustrated better than when Victor discovers who, or what, is going to replace him at Mycroft-Watson Associates; the line "well, basically, with this box" is simply not as effective when you can't see Mrs Inglis pick the box up. Nevertheless, there are a few interesting alterations now and again; the opening scene where Victor's desk is being disassembled is cut from "Alive and Buried", so the very first scene is now one with Victor and Margaret, and the box originally had a female voice (provided by an uncredited Joanna Phillips-Lane, according to IMDB), but the remake has a male voice with an electronic effect applied (presumably done by Jeffrey Holland, who splits the roles of "everyone who isn't Victor, Margaret, Mrs Warboys or Nick Swainey" with Sally Grace in the remake, and perhaps trying to compensate for the aforementioned issue).

SOME OTHER CHANGES BETWEEN THE TV AND RADIO VERSIONS

• The crisp packet Victor finds on the front lawn is Bovril flavour in the original, Marmite in the remake
• The dialogue between the two police officers when Victor approaches Sharon is cut in the radio version; perhaps to save on hiring another actor, but us only finding out the 'young lady' is an undercover police officer is arguably funnier when the first we hear of it is Victor reading out the newspaper article
• In "Luton Airport", Victor doesn't throw his beer over himself, the scene just ends with him and Margaret being eerily calm
• Extra bit of dialogue between Margaret and Mrs Warboys at the end of "Luton" with the latter saying she saw Victor's car driving off, to better establish he's gone back to the ruins of their old house
• A few small trims to "The Beast in the Cage", including removing a reference to Gyles Brandreth and the entire phone scene (possibly because the punchline is entirely visual)

All other guest parts were recast for the radio versions, and one of the actors in the adaptation of "The Beast in the Cage" is of particular interest to us, as it may provide a clue as to exactly when these recordings were done: Michael Fenton Stevens takes on the role of Mr Salmon (played by Trevor Byfield in the original). But just weeks before he was heard in One Foot in the Grave on 11 February 1995, Fenton Stevens was seen in it: the broadcast of these radio episodes overlapped with Series 5 of the TV show, and his appearance as Pippa's brother Geoffrey in the episode "Hole in the Sky" was aired on 22 January.

Unfortunately, Richard Webber's book does not include the studio recording dates for Series 5, only that location filming was done between 9 October and 13 November 1994. But I immediately thought to check what John J. Hoare (who has done a lot of work linking to this blog on more widely-read places recently which I am enormously grateful to him for) might have written about those recording dates, and thanks to him I was able to pin the "Hole in the Sky" studio session down to 6 November. But in any event: Does the very minor oddity of one of the radio episodes and one of the TV episodes sharing a guest star raise the possibility that they were both done around the same time?