May 2012 Re-run on BBC Radio 4

Severed Threads: From Downtown Manhattan to Suburban Minneapolis

John Dryden’s three-part serial Severed Threads is all about the random connections between people who have never met each other and how chance events can ripple across cultures and change the lives of people we have never met. It’s a mixture of the concept of six degrees of separation and the ‘butterfly effect’ transposed to globalism in modern India, America, and the U.K.

Goldhawk Productions. Premier, October 27th 2010.

Episode 1: God’s Clothing Firm

Episode 2: If Thy Hand Offend Thee

Episode 3: The Reckoning

Composer ….. Sacha Puttnam. Written and Directed by John Dryden.
A Goldhawk Essential production for BBC Radio 4.

Reviews: www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbradio4/NF2766771

Pandemic – Radio Drama, directed by John Dryden Music by Sacha Puttnam.

On Air March 2012.

John Dryden’s ingenious three-part thriller imagines a world destroyed by a violent virus epidemic, which is first diagnosed as bird flu, but then understood to be a far more dangerous disease (called “red-eye”), that can wipe out whole populations at random. The disease breaks out in the world’s most populous cities, such as Bangkok and Sao Paolo, but rapidly spreads around the globe causing mayhem in its wake. Even in Great Britain, which remains largely unaffected by the disaster, there is a chronic shortage of labour.

Pandemic is constructed as a series of three quest narratives (“The Present,” “The Future,” and “The Past”), in which three protagonists discover the causes and effects of the disaster. In the first, Dr. Jan Roldano (Ben Daniels), a microbiologist invited to give a keynote lecture at a conference in Bangkok, is unwittingly drawn into a quest to find out what happened. In the second play, set five years later, after the disaster has wiped out the population, civil servant Diane Harper (Emily Beecham) discovers many of the secrets that the government tried to suppress about what happened. In the third play Richard Frankel (Paul Fox), one of a group of eco-warriors, tries to find out what happened to his ex-girlfriend Anna (Marene Vanholk), and discovered how the pandemic originated. The trilogy ends with an echo of the first episode, reminding us of just how deadly the virus actually was.

In dramatic terms Pandemic is rather like an onion, with layer upon of layer of plot peeled away - in the present, future and the past – until we find out exactly what happened. The media believe the disaster was initiated by Osama Bin Laden; the truth is much more sinister. The production as a whole is an aural feast, with Steve Bond’s sound-design and Sacha Putnam’s music creating an eerie effect, with voices and music layered upon one another: the form is rather like the content, it needs to be peeled apart to be fully appreciated.

Genuinely frightening and frighteningly true: Pandemic might be science fiction, but it could so easily happen.

Laurence Raw,
Baskent University.

While last week’s excellent adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities remained faithful to the original dramatic core, Ayeesha Menon’s transformation of Martin Chuzzlewit into The Mumbai Chuzzlewits(Classic Serial, Radio 4, Saturday) takes the core and boldly relocates it to contemporary India.

What strikes you, though, apart from the odd reference to mobile phones and debit cards, is how smoothly the key elements of family, greed and betrayal translate. Chuzzlewit (Roshan Seth) remains a paranoid old control freak with a nasty turn of phrase. “You’re a stupid idiot who should’ve died years ago choking on your stupidity,” is a typical outburst. Far-flung family members still flock to be near Chuzzlewit when they think he’s dying and they might get a share of his fortune; the scene in which they hear he is recovering was a delight. And modern-day Mumbai is as obsessed with status, social hierarchy and making money as Victorian Britain ever was.

The production’s soundscape is one of the highlights, with a real immediacy from the first moment, which begins with the squawk of something exotic. Sound recordings on location give this version of Dickens a rich and vivid texture that matches Menon’s crisp, involving writing. It’s the sort of adaptation that makes you want to re-read the original while enjoying its ingenious difference.

Composer Sacha Puttnam
Directed by Jordan Stone

“Irwin & Fran” is a feature length film shot in New York City in late 2009 and 2011, it is a film about the Prof. Irwin Corey and his wife of over 70 years, Fran. Irwin is 98 years old and started in show business in 1938. He is a famous stand up comedian and political satirist and has appeared on Broadway, in Hollywood films and Television since the 1940′s.

http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi3830618393

In Production 2011

BBC Dickens Season

Broadcast as three 60 minute dramas on BBC Radio 4 on 1st, 8th and 15th January 2011

At the end of this year, to mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth in 2012, BBC Radio 4 presents two new Dickens adaptations – A Tale Of Two Cities, produced by Jeremy Mortimer for the BBC, and Martin Chuzzlewit recorded in Bombay and produced by John Dryden/Goldhawk Essential.

It’s the fourth major radio production Goldhawk has made in India (after A SUITABLE BOY, Q&A and SIX SUSPECTS) and all the action is to be recorded on locations in a documentary style.

The cast includes, Roshan Seth, Rajit Kapur, Radihika Mital, Shernaz Patel,Karan Pandit, Zafar Karachiwala, Ayeesha Menon, Preetika Chawla, Sohrab Ardeshir, Nadir Khan, Nimrat Kaur, Rohit Malkani, Arghya Lahiri and  Vivek Madan. The director is John Dryden.

Cinematic game for the Nintendo 3D.

Best RPG at E3.

‘When it comes to the music of Heroes of Ruin, the team were very much aware of the importance of creating an appropriate atmosphere through sound. Perhaps it was unsurprising that in searching for someone that could deliver a soundtrack with both subtlety and power they found their way to Sacha Puttnam.’  Square Enix

In Production 2011. Northern Media Productions. Directed by Phil Shotton and Dawn Furness, Producer Tom Harvey, Composer Sacha Puttnam.

‘From the BAFTA and EMMY Award winning Journalist and fim maker.’

Documentary-maker John Pilger on the grotesque untruth of “weapons of mass destruction” and the cowardliness of the mainstream media taking the official lineIn Cinemas 13th December 2010. On ITV1 14th December 2010.

Dartmouth Films/ITV.

Director: John Pilger, Composer: Sacha Puttnam.

The War You Don’t See – review

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 9 December 2010 22.49 GMT  Peter Bradshaw

WMD exposé … John Pilger in The War You Don’t See.

Documentary-maker John Pilger has returned to a subject that can’t be revived often enough: the grotesque untruth of “weapons of mass destruction”: a cloudy concept, eagerly amplified and lent credibility by credulous and submissive journalists who, after 9/11, lost their nerve en masse. Pilger’s contention is that on Afghanistan, on Iraq and on Israel and the Palestinian territories, the mainstream media simply take the official line. The force of his film is in its contention that the colossal scale of civilian casualties is, within the grammar of news, downgraded in importance so that it doesn’t figure as news at all, but as all-but-invisible deep background to be ignored. Pilger gives due respect to WikiLeaks, although his praise for al-Jazeera’s independence is ironic, given that WikiLeaks has just revealed the possibility that the Qatar government is manipulating the channel.

‘To find true love, you must open but one eye. To keep it, you must close both.’

Crossroads Films.  Cast: Hugh Bonneville, Anna Chancellor, Sebastian Street, Composer Sacha Puttnam, Director Dan Nathan.

Miserable critic, Brian Tanner, is famous for his vicious film reviews on his TV show Critical Eye.  Over the years he’s grown to hate pretty much everything he sees – including his wife.  This comes to a head during a bitter row, when she ends up hurling a glass at him and changing his view on life forever.  He loses his show, and very possibly his marbles, but on the other hand…he really does seem happy.