Cops and Robbers
From policemen meeting Sherlock Holmes and Poirot, to a robbery in George Eliot's Silas Marner; The Pink Panther theme to Ella Fitzgerald, opera by Puccini and Gilbert and Sullivan.
Policemen are heroic in Agatha Christie's Poirot, villainous in Puccini's opera Tosca, and utterly useless in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes masterpiece, A Study in Scarlet, while Gilbert and Sullivan's chorus of cops grumble that their lot 'is not a happy one'.
Robbers are just as morally ambiguous. Simon and Garfunkel sing of a guilt-stricken thief, and Chester Himes paints a moving portrait of a penniless New York counterfeiter, while Dickens taught Victorian England to sympathise with pickpockets in Oliver Twist. But robbery creates victims, as George Eliot's Silas Marner discovers when his beloved gold is stolen. And Joan Didion tries to get beneath the skin of the most ambiguous thief of all: kidnapped heiress turned bank robber, Patty Hearst.
Music includes robbery by Debussy, borrowing and mocking Wagner's 'Tristan' theme, and Rachmaninoff, riffing on Paganini; while poetry by John Milton depicts time itself as the thief of lost youth.
Our readers include David Jonsson, who starred as the police detective in Agatha Christie's Murder is Easy (大象传媒 One).
Producer: Hannah Sander
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- Sun 8 Dec 2024 18:00大象传媒 Radio 3
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