WOMAN’S HOUR DRAMA
Radio 4, 10.45am/7.45pm
In Minor Characters, Joyce Johnson wrote of her life as part of the Fifties Beat movement — mainly her relationship with Jack Kerouac, the author of On the Road. Dramatised excellently by Rachael McGill, today’s first instalment sets the scene — very clever, brittle people speaking as though they are on speed (as they probably were) in a way that could be terribly pretentious, and is, about sex, pain and the creative act. Did I mention that the stars, Clara Perez and Jaimi Barbakoff, are brilliant? That’s a full house, then.
HOTEL ANTHRAX
Radio 4, 8pm
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A very strange little number, this. During the Fifites and Sixties, it seems, American scientists testing the affects of various poisons — anthrax for one — had at their disposal human guinea-pigs, all volunteers from the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Quite how this came to be — as well as other intriguing little titbits about tests that were carried out on other, but rather more unsuspecting, civilians innocently taking a bus ride home — recently came to light in declassified records. And now here they are to give us all nightmares. Lovely.