Today’s Joanna Page was going to be Radio 4’s Dickens piss-take, Bleak Expectations:
The plot revolves around Philip “Pip” Bin and his two sisters, Poppy and Pippa, whose seemingly ideal life is disrupted by the death of their father and the madness of their mother. They are then locked away by their guardian, Mr. Gently Benevolent, in St. Bastard’s, the most vicious boarding school in England, and St. Bitch’s, a nearby convent. Pip and his sisters attempt to free themselves of their guardian with the help of Harry Biscuit, whose father invented the biscuit.
I knew she was in it: her IMDB page says she is* and IMDB would never lie, would it?
I listened to the whole first series, trying to work out which character she might be. It’s actually pretty good if you know Dickens even vaguely, although it does remind me of all those skits you used to write in sixth form where you’d play on words, looking for a silly alternative meaning to every line and then running with the sillier meaning. But it’s very funny all the same, and Anthony Head’s great as the evil Mr Benevolent. I’ll probably scout out the second series when I can, and a third series has just been recorded.
Anyway, for a second, I thought she might be Flora Dies-Early, a pastiche of David Copperfield‘s Dora Spenlow, whom she played in the most recent BBC1 adaptation. But she wasn’t.
Was IMDB mistaken? Surely not. So I investigated further…
