Each of the three programmes in this short series of drama documentaries explores a different medical condition. The voices of patients and their doctors—the documentary part—are interwoven with a radio drama. These voiceovers serve as a commentary on the drama, which in turn serves as a metaphor for the pathology, the symptoms, and their emotional impact. A tall order, for a 30 minute programme. Did it work? The short answer (at least with the first two programmes made available for review) is no. Yet the series still provided moments of dramatic power.
The first programme, “The Drowning,” dealt with cystic fibrosis. In the drama, the sole survivor of a tragic shipwreck mixed memories of the events around the sinking, including a vision he had of a beautiful and mysterious woman. Unfortunately, the drama totally disordered—and distracted from—the documentary, which was trying to explain the condition and its treatment and tell the story of a real patient, Jo, delicately reported by her father. The main problem was the abstruseness of the dramatic metaphor. Granted, a patient with cystic fibrosis can experience something like drowning, but the hero of this drama spent most of his lines musing on how and why he had not drowned (although, at the end, he did die, but without any obvious explanation). I struggled to see why the drama was about him at all.
The second programme, “Battle Cry” (on Parkinson's disease), presented a more convincing dramatic metaphor. Two strategists were planning war moves in a secret nerve centre. I understood the metaphorical connection of neural nexus with military machine. In the drama, telephoned military orders were mutinously ignored and a neurologist's commentary likened this to neurotransmitters not ringing their receptors. However, this programme's success was partial. For example, the documentary's real life patient (a middle-aged mother) explained her distress at developing a mask like face and how it reduced her range of possible emotional contact with her children. Crassly, the drama then featured a military commander talking about putting on a brave face when spinning bad news in a propaganda broadcast. The drama had missed the point of the documentary's message. It wasn't about hiding inner feelings; it was about being trapped in a disordered body that could not display them.
What struck me about this series was that powerful drama was, paradoxically, only to be found in the documentary element.
Thus, in the first programme on cystic fibrosis, we heard the father of Jo, the patient, perfectly encapsulate both the pathology and his pain, when he said, “If you kissed her, she tasted salty.” We heard that Jo had had a lung transplant and her doctor then said, ‘There are days you come off the ward and you could use some really foul language to describe CF . . . it’s a pig of a disease and we hate it.” The father's simple “Jo died,” spoken in a faltering voice, was the next that we heard. I silently cursed when the actors returned, breaking the spell.
Signs of Life is a bold experiment, which, these days, only radio would dare to broadcast. Unfortunately, it tries to do too much with too little time, and mixes its two genres clumsily, sometimes incomprehensibly. However, its disease is intriguing and the doctor in me can't resist listening to the last programme (on alcohol dependence syndrome) just in case the metaphor dramatically cures the message.