Neville Watchurst's 'The Angel Of Rome'
Directed by Sue Wilson
Broadcast December 4, 1992
Coded from tape at 128/44.1
The heart of the Catholic Church in the Vatican City used to be an all male preserve. Rich enough to afford custom music from the great composers, the music often required sopranos; an unnatural pitch for adult male voices. Boys were too troublesome, & their voices broke.
The Sistine Chapel Choir resolved this matter by employing males who had been castrated before their voices broke.
As far as we know, Alessandro Moreschi, was the last of these. Born in 1858. He died in 1924. This is his story. It is both bitter & joyous.
The play includes recordings Alessandro made in 1902 & 1904.

Simon Montefiore - Young Stalin
read by James Adams
What makes a Stalin? Was he illegitimate? Was his mother whore or saint? Was Stalin a Tsarist agent or Lenin's chief gangster? Was his most notorious heist planned during his stay in London? Was he to blame for his wife's death? If he really missed the 1917 Revolution, how did he emerge so powerful?
Born in poverty, scarred by his upbringing, exceptional in his studies, this charismatic but dangerous boy was hailed as a romantic poet and trained as a priest but found his mission as fanatical revolutionary. He became the mastermind of bank-robberies, protection-rackets, arson, piracy and murder yet he was, uniquely, part-intellectual, part-brigand. Surprisingly, he is also revealed as a scandalously prolific lover, leaving a trail of mistresses (varying from schoolgirls to noblewomen) and illegitimate children.

"Somewhere," muses Noah Calhoun, while sitting on his porch in the moonight, "there were people making love." The Notebook, a Southern-fried story of love-lost-and-found-again, revolves around a single time-honored romantic dilemma: will beautiful Allison Nelson stay with Mr. Respectability (to whom she happens to be engaged), or will she choose Noah, the romantic rascal she left so many years ago?