When I first started my MA about eighteen months ago, I took up an Audible offer of 3 months for 99p or some such thing. I thought it might help me with the studying to listen to the books as well as read them, especially things like Paradise Lost.

I was wrong.

Not because the narrations were bad, not at all. They were fine. I just don’t listen very well to audiobooks, it turns out. It worked all right reading alongside, but that rather defeated the purpose of being able to listen while, for example, tidying.

But I did find a set of BBC radio plays of four Georgette Heyer novels: Friday’s Child, Regency Buck, Faro’s Daughter, and the murder mystery Envious Casca. I did, however, remember hearing Radio 4’s adaptation of Arabella when it was the Book at Bedtime when I was a teenager and being quite disappointed by the abridgments. Took out the the fun.

Sadly, the same thing happened with, especially, Friday’s Child. After that I paid even less attention to the other plays. No reflection on the actors, who were brilliant (very taken with the image of James Frain as the careless Viscount Sherry), but all the very great fun of Friday’s Child, which is, really, one of the more absurd of Heyer’s Regency romps, has been removed.

Friday’s Child follows Sherry and his young bride Hero, whom he marries because the season’s Beauty has rejected him and he needs to marry in order to break a Trust and access his money. Hero is untrained in High Society, being a Poor Relation and intended to become a governess (or to marry the curate), so all sorts of mistakes and confusions ensue. They’re surrounded by a large cast of supporting characters, several of whom are reincarnated as the leads in later novels, particularly cousin Ferdy who becomes Freddy in Cotillion.

Written and published towards the end of WWII, Friday’s Child is very definitely a Frivolous Novel About Nothing, designed as a distraction from the seriousness of world affairs, very much an Escapist Novel. It is light and frothy and comic.

And the radio play seems not to understand any of that. Which is a pity.