BBC Radio 7, 25 July 2009
Another installment in the series of Maugham adaptations, this tale
made ingenious use of the myth of the noble savage encountering the innocent - or, if one wants to put it more succinctly,
the Beauty and the Beast story. The beauty in question was Martha Jones (Anna Massey), a fortysomething spinster who spent
all her life in the Dutch East Indies working as a missionary with her brother (David Timson). Although convinced of the rightness
of her task, her relationship with the locals was non-existent, due in no small part to her schoolmarmish manners, which had
the effect of alienating rather than drawing people towards God.
Things changed, however, once she encountered Ginger Ted (Bill Nighy). At the first
the two were like chalk and cheese: Martha was convinced that Ted was about to rape her, when the two of them found themselves
marooned on a boat. She tried her best to stay awake, but sleep overcame her; when she awoke she found that Ted had nothing
more to her other than covering her with a blanket to protect her against the cold.
Time passed; and Martha tried her best to engineer another meeting with Ted, even
though he had no particular wish to meet her. However fate once again intervened, as the two were sent up-country to deal
with a cholera epidemic. Martha drew on her medical skills, Ted provided the communication; and the two of them accomplished
their task successfully. This time romance blossomed: Ted returned a changed man, having forsaken alcohol for good, while
Martha had learned to loosen up and show off her culinary skills.
This slight tale of a colonial romance was once again narrated by Dirk Bogarde, who
relished the task of telling how Ted had flown in the face of convention by abandoning his traditional garb of a singlet and
dirty shorts for a full dress-suit. His experiences proved beyond all doubt that "love is a many-splendoured thing."
