The BBC announced last week that record numbers are using its BBC Sounds online platform, with more than four million listeners a week accessing it for podcasts, music mixes and on-demand music. (This compares to 33.11 million who listened to his live radio output.) I use it a lot and I’m glad I was out, to catch up with Red Lines, a quirky Radio drama 4 on the failed efforts of Prime Minister David Cameron to bring down the Syrian regime denounced the use of chemical weapons in his own village in 2013.
On paper it sounded tempting, with Toby Stephens playing Cameron and Impressionist master Jon Culshaw as Ed Miliband, William Hague and George Osborne. Even more intriguing, Red Lines was co-written by historian Sir Anthony Seldon (a biographer of Cameron) and Sir Craig Oliver (who was Cameron’s director of communications at number 10). But any hope that this true-blue couple could be the new Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn (of the fame of Yes Minister) was quickly dashed.
Because even though it happened in a pretty entertaining way, it was never clear what they hoped to achieve with it. What started out as a soaked satire about a prime minister’s holiday interrupted by his conscience (Samantha Cameron was reduced to a cardboard cutout “but you said you’d make time for kids” that moans) ended in a exercise of political excuse. doing.
Even stranger was how his attempt to portray Cameron as a man of principles, downcast by the political profession and the perfidious opportunism of Labor Ed Miliband, had the opposite effect of portraying him as a light political weight. , a weak man unable to persuade even his own cabinet to follow him, and a pawn who could not see Vladimir Putin pushing him around the global chessboard. Deliberately or not, William Hague (brilliantly played by Culshaw) was the only character who seemed to have no idea what the statist involved.
Even the “biggest” claim of the drama that not making a meaningful response to such a clear rupture of the red lines set by the West encouraged Putin to invade Crimea six months later and therefore resulted in directly to his invasion of Ukraine this February, it seemed. an oversimplification, to say the least.
The view of the interior does not always seem to offer the clearest perspective.