Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: David Warner, Susannah Harker, Sam Kelly, Joannah Tincey, David Horovitch.
Our greatest curse as a human being is surely that of nostalgia, the memory we wrap in gold and sepia, the melancholy we hold up as the epitome of our life on Earth; doomed to go over the lines forever, condemned by the failures of our time, nostalgia in all its forms is the blissful high before the regretful and terminal low.
If the opening story to the third series of Big Finish’s Sapphire and Steel audio dramas was considered a soul numbing slump, then its successor, Remember Me, should be respected as one of the finest of the genre to have been penned and performed, and it is one that comes with its own perfect warning regarding the memory of time, the illusion of the memorial of the retrospective.
Time was the stars of yesterday were the ones who could command royal performances on their own, the situation comedies of the 1970s and 80s still receive the attention they deserve, and yet the stars themselves, as is inevitable, fade, become jaded, the thoughts that carried their voice, become lost, diminishing into the ether. It is for Eric, voiced by the exceptional and much missed Sam Kelly, a proof that Time has no place for him, for all his success, for all the fame, he has, in his own mind, become nothing.
Time’s temptation is ever probing, and in the act of nostalgia, it has a way into the world, to terrorise, to take, steal, all that it can so it can feed in the darkness of the human heart.
John Dorney’s sublime observation of the faded star and the regrets he has swimming around his soul, the death of his estranged wife, the refusal to have contact dictated to by his daughter, the memories that remain, it is an audio drama that truly gets underneath the skin of all of all who listen. The reason for this can seem quite obvious, that memory is subjective, all that may have seemed important at the time, soon vanishes, all that was damaging, takes on a stronger edge, and so it is to time that we inevitably find turning against us, but driven by our desire to hurt ourselves, to damage our soul.
A truly excellent audio drama, John Dorney delivering his very best observations to the fore.
Ian D. Hall