The Pickerskill Reports

Don't miss The Pickerskill Reports (Radio 4, Friday mornings). This is comedy done without a studio audience, nothing between listener and performance but the ringing of the doorbell, the noises in the street. It is good enough to blot out both. Ian McDiarmid translates Andrew McGibbons's script into a world of its own, faintly sinister, oddly true and far too funny ever to be on TV.

Ian McDiarmid plays Dr Henry Pickerskill, retired teacher of English at a now defunct boys' public school. What he's always looked out for are oddities, the boys who didn't conform to the solid stereotype, the spirited iconoclasts, prizing them for their originality. That means, of course, the ones with a bent for junior criminality. This is his series of reports on such chaps, what happened at the school and later. It's very funny, in a sinister, sarcastic sort of way, beautifully written (by Andrew McGibbon), and brilliantly played.

Ian McDiarmid Interview

Shakespearean actor and Tony award winner Ian McDiarmid will be forever etched on the minds of cinema-goers as the evil Senator Palpatine in the Star Wars franchise. He is now stepping into the shoes of the late Ian Richardson to play a school headmaster in the Radio 4 drama series The Pickerskill Reports.

The first series of this fictional schoolmaster memoir, The Pickerskill Detentions, starred the late Ian Richardson as the crafty teacher who delivers rough justice to his more difficult pupils. That play packed such a narrative punch that, four years on, it's still fresh in the memory, and this follow-up promises to do the same. Ian McDiarmid takes on the role and pits himself against an apparently perfect choirboy who has a nice little sideline in extortion and theft.

A paean, in a way, to original thought, it's also a rumination on the sliding scale of crime and punishment and the difficulty of knowing exactly where to draw the line.