Happy Sunday everyone, we’ve made it safely into a new month and the mornings are getting lighter, which given how early I catch the train to work can only be a good thing! Anyway, a book adjacent treat for your ears today:
I’ve written about the books in the Charles Paris series before, but Radio 4 have done a really good series of dramatisations of them – and I’ve just got finished listening to the latest one, Situation Tragedy. As you can see from the picture, Bill Nighy is Charles and he’s captured the louche, lightly drunk, slightly bumbling, just good enough to keep getting enough work that he can stay in the acting profession persona of Charles brilliantly.
But actually for me, the cleverest bit of the dramatisations is the way that they’ve managed to update some of the books. Simon Brett started writing the series in the mid 1970s but they exist in what I call the floating now – which is to say that Charles has been in his late 50s for nearly 50 years at this point (the most recent book came out in 2018) and obviously a lot has changed in the world of acting as well as the world in general during that time, but Jeremy Front (who has adapted most of them) finds ways to bring them up to date and give them a bit of continuity (especially as the adaptations haven’t been in the same order they were published). There are a few changes – some more major than others but it’s fun – and funny – and undemanding to listen to Charles work his way fringe theatre, musicals, audiobook narration, instructional training videos, documentary extras, radio plays, the whole shebang.
I was a bit slow to spot Situation Tragedy – so it’s already starting to disappear from BBC Sounds, but it’ll be available from Audible later on in the year. And the rest of the series do pop up from time to time being repeated on the radio which puts them back on Sounds – Doubtful Death is on there at the moment for example. But there are also three collected editions of the dramatisations.
Have a great Sunday!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 
Actually, in the books, Charles Paris starts off aged 47 in a story published in 1974 that refers to being set in 1972, I think. So he might have aged a little initially until the early 1980s.
I was amused to hear how references to the internet, mobiles etc have been slipped into an adaptation of one of the earliest novels – I’ve read the first 3 in 2022 and #4 a few weeks ago.
I didn’t realise that there were dramatisations of these novels. I can totally imagine Bill NIghy as Charles so will have to see which ones I can listen to.