Given that there’s not a great deal worth watching this week, with the sole exception of the terrific third season of Being Human on BBC3, I have been passing the time lately with my favourite fall-back source of entertainment: the archive-trawling Radio 7. In particular the daily Crime & Thriller broadcasts of Raffles.
Written by Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung, the stories themselves are neither as plentiful nor as well remembered as those of Sherlock Holmes. However despite the occasional self-knowing references to ‘That fellow on Baker Street’ there’s a certain insouciant fun about Raffles that I find makes it all feel really rather appealing. A. J. Raffles is rather like the Anti-Holmes; a gentleman thief and legendary sportsman, bon viveur and man about town. Accompanied by his loyal friend, ‘Bunny’, his Moriarty is a dogged Scotland Yard inspector and his Reichenbach a head-first dive into the ocean while escaping capture on a cruise liner. Comparisons are inevitable and I’m sure literary scholars have been chronicling them for years, but to be honest that’s all rather beside the point.
Call me sentimental if you like, but despite their advancing age the BBC’s audio series is still a great little piece of broadcasting. Made between 1985 and 1993, the adaptations star Jeremy Clyde as A. J. Raffles and Michael Cochrane as Harry ‘Bunny’ Manders. Neither may be particularly household names, but Clyde in particular positively oozes with delightfully glib public school charm and an RP accent of almost knee-weakening loveliness.
Free of dated visual cues, good radio ages incredibly well and that’s probably one of my favourite things about it. To be fair if I hadn’t looked it up I’d have been hard pressed to tell you if they were recorded twenty years ago or the day before yesterday. The episodes themselves come in at just under half an hour each but the stories roll along at a fair pace with plenty of daring adventures and narrow escapes, along with what I can only describe as the most blazing of late-Victorian homoerotic subtexts. It’s an utter delight, regardless of how unintentional it may have been at the time.
Though to be honest calling it unintentional could be a little questionable. Given as when, during the episode entitled The Rest Cure, Bunny dons a lady’s wrap and is complimented upon his appearance by Raffles, rather than taking it off he decides it would be the very best of jokes to dress up entirely as a woman, paint his face and put on a pot of coffee to ‘please his friend’ in time for Raffles’ return from a nearby housebreaking. I admit at that point I did dissolve into a horrific fit of the giggles for reasons that I’m sure Hornung never intended. The cast, on the other hand, seem to be having a fantastically amusing time with it all.
So long as you don’t mind being chained to the computer for it, the Radio 7 transmissions are freely available to listen to for a limited time, even internationally. It’s not a particularly long listening window, unfortunately, and the first few episodes have already fallen off the iPlayer, but repeats are moderately regular for pretty much everything that goes out on Radio 7 so I’d be surprised if they didn’t turn up again at some point along the line.
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