BBC Radio's "Vivat Rex" is a towering creative achievement - and a hell of a history lesson!

I really hadn’t intended spending this Bank Holiday listening to five hours of radio drama, but I caught the end of the sixth instalment of Vivat Rex on BBC Radio 4 Extra this morning while doing the ironing – and was hooked. After lunch, I found the first five episodes on BBC iPlayer and spent the whole afternoon in a sort of enthralled daze.

Vivat Rex’s 26 hour-long episodes were first broadcast to mark the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. Not being much of a radio listener back then, I missed the whole series. Now, 35 years later, they’re being rebroadcast to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Producer-Director Martin Jenkins and co-director Gerry Jones tell the story of eleven English monarchs through the work of Elizabethan playwrights. One episode might combine, say, chunks of Shakespeare and Marlowe.

What we get are battles and murder and treason and infighting and rebellion and whatnot - i.e all the really interesting stuff. Actors include Derek Jacobi, John Hurt and Michael Redgrave, with Richard Burton narrating (i.e. voicing the links). The effect is mesmerising, almost overwhelming – I literally couldn’t stop listening.

Radio 4 Extra is one of the finest services ever produced by the BBC. Listening to the station (usually when I’m doing the ironing) has helped me appreciate that radio is an almost perfect medium for classic drama: there’s nothing to distract one’s attention. The director can’t dress everyone up in Nazi uniforms or force the actors to get their kit off for no reason.

In his fascinating 1999 book, The User Illusion, Tor Nørretranders sought to quantify the amount of information our brains can  take in at any one moment - I seem to remember we’re limited to 35Kb or so, but don’t quote me on it. While watching TV or movies or an opera or stage play, the sheer amount of visual data on offer means we have to  ignore quite a bit of what’s being thrown at us: but with radio, our receiving apparatus and the amount of information we’re being fed pretty much match perfectly. Perhaps that’s why good radio drama is so peculiarly satisfying – our consciousness isn’t being over-stretched, but neither do our minds wander because we have unused cognitive capacity.

It probably works well for me in any case because I’m not a particularly visual person: when I catch up with TV programmes online – even films – as often as not I’ll listen rather that watch what’s happening on the screen. I rarely feel I’ve missed much.

Back to Vivat Rex. Today’s five hours started with Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, segued into Edward III (which may have been by Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd), then into Richard II, which is definitely by Shakespeare. Derek Jacobi (creepy, weak Richard II) and John Hurt (creepy, weak and roaringly gay Edward II) are both brilliant, and Michael Redgrave – who was himself a sick old man at the time – delivering “This scept’red isle” as the dying John of Gaunt is extraordinarily moving.

The first six episodes are currently available here – but hurry: they’re starting to disappear. The whole 26 episodes are being broadcast on Radio 4 Extra over the coming months. What a brilliant concept, and what a stupendous creative achievement! (Bloody good history lesson into the bargain.)