Far Away Places, Cheaply Made

Escape was the poor relation — no permanent sponsor, shunted around the schedule, using the same repertory of players who had already done a Suspense that week. And it is, episode for episode, the more inventive programme. Freedom from a sponsor turns out to be worth a great deal.

The house style is a first-person narrator in trouble, somewhere hot, running out of time. Cheap to stage and impossible to do badly if the writing holds. The adaptations of short stories — Stephenson, Connell, Conrad — are close, unsentimental and often end on a note that a sponsored show would have softened.

You can hear the budget in the crowd scenes, which are four people. It does not matter. Radio adventure survives on the certainty in the narrator's voice, and Escape casts for exactly that.