The Lovesong of Alfred J Hitchcock

1993
 The Master of Suspense is at the height of his powers. He toils in his mind’s eye to define a dreamlike vision of a dark-clad woman walking away from him. Where is she? On a deserted ship? In a street? And who is she? All he can hear are the first letters of her name: M-a... As again and again he revisits this image in his inner world, and begins the creative struggle to articulate it in story terms, the woman leads him to a graveyard, up a staircase to a scene of murder, into an open grave itself..

The radio audience listen in on the Master’s inward musings, and on his dialogues with a screenwriter, as gradually there begins to crystallize in Hitchcock’s distressed imagination some haunted vision that will separate out into films we recognize: Rear Window, Vertigo, The Birds...Produced at BBC Pebble Mill radio studios (now demolished), and directed by Philip Martin - a high-risk radio producer if ever there was one, and another company’s gain is BBC’s loss. The broadcast won me a Society of Authors Silver for best original script, and for Richard Griffiths a Sony Gold for his magisterial and definitive performance.