Double Jeopardy: A BBC Radio 4 dramatisation

Stephen Wyatt

Jul 2011 · BBC Digital Audio · Narrated by Adrian Scarborough and Patrick Stewart

About this audiobook

Patrick Stewart stars as Raymond Chandler and Adrian Scarborough as Billy Wilder in BBC Radio 4's entertaining glimpse inside the Hollywood film industry. In 1944 Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder came together to work on a screen adaptation of James M. Cain's novel 'Double Indemnity'. Wilder is an ambitious 36-year-old German Jewish émigré just making his name as a director, and Chandler is a reformed alcoholic with a developing reputation as a novelist but absolutely no experience of writing for movies. The play follows their famously difficult collaboration. Paramount studios put Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder together because none of the big names would touch James M. Cain's novel. With its adulterous lovers and a crime that could be copied, it was judged too controversial to adapt because of the censorious Production Code guidelines. Chandler and Wilder famously hated each other but in a space of some four months locked in an office together they created an outstanding screenplay for a ground-breaking classic film. With Patrick Stewart ('Macbeth', 'Star Trek') as Chandler and Adrian Scarborough ('Cranford', 'The King's Speech') as Billy Wilder, 'Double Jeopardy' is directed by Claire Grove. 'Double Jeopardy' was originally broadcast as the 'Afternoon Play' on 4 February 2011.

About the author

Stephen Wyatt was born in Beckenham, Kent and brought up in Ealing in West London. He was educated at Latymer Upper School and then went on to Clare College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge, he directed the 1973 Footlights Revue, Every Packet Carries a Government Health Warning, as well as productions of The Mikado, Handel’s Semele and Verdi’s I Due Foscari. His first full-length comedy, Exit, Pursued by a Bear, was produced at the Edinburgh Festival in 1973. After a brief spell as Lecturer in Drama at Glasgow University, he began his career as a playwright in 1975 as writer/researcher with the Belgrade Coventry Theatre in Education team. In 1982 and 1983 he was Resident Writer with the London Bubble Theatre. Stephen has worked widely as a freelance playwright in theatre, radio and television ever since. He also has considerable experience as a teacher, workshop leader and script reader and in the creation of audio guides. The first piece he wrote for television was a play called Claws which led to his being commissioned to write Paradise Towers and then The Greatest Show in the Galaxy for Doctor Who. In 2008, his play, Memorials to the Missing, won the Tinniswood Award for best original radio script of 2007 as well as Silver in the Best Drama category of the 2008 Sony Radio Awards. He spent two years as Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Sussex and in the autumn of 2011 he took up a post as RLF Writing Fellow on Greenwich University’s Maritime campus. Author biography by David J. Howe, author of The Target Book, the complete illustrated guide to the Target Doctor Who novelisations.