Assume Nothing: The Handler - A Matter of Life and Death Radio 4
There are so-called beauty spots in Northern Ireland that are no go in my head.
The Giant’s Ring – a boy of 14 was found with his coat over his head and shot three times.
Knockagh Monument – it was the setting for a cruel murder and gives the lie to the place’s reputation as a “beauty spot”. Another no go.
Assume Nothing: The Handler is the dramatised memoir of a Special Branch Officer.
Making a drama out of such a memoir has its challenges.
Add the 1970s and the early days of the Troubles, and it’s even more so.
People who lived through and remember such dark days may turn their backs remembering old black and white footage of bodies beaten, bound and dumped on border lanes.
But this is a taut thriller and interesting in that it opens a window on the secretive world of police handlers, how they recruited informers; how they operated.
In the opening episode – The First Good Source – James, the handler, talks about recruiting his first informer.
James was operating in south Armagh.
He found a young IRA member from a good family who was up for burglary.
“He probably wouldn’t have gone to jail as it was a second offence... but I leaned on him.
“He was very easy to turn.”
It’s a world of whispered calls from old phone boxes; it’s a world full of coded messages.
In this world, a box of tomatoes is never just a box of tomatoes – it’s guns and ammo, it’s a world where red, yellow and green is a colour code of a sinister hue.
It’s a world where you can hide a lot below a lorry load of fish.
There is plenty of tension and drama.
Take a meeting at Ravensdale where the informer hitched a lift – he hadn’t a car - jumped into the back seat, lay down flat.
It comes down to “a bloody, dangerous game,”, the kind of coded messages, “same place as last minus an hour and a half”; the world of unapproved roads and real places like Hackballscross.
This is a thriller of a listen - pacy, and boosted by a cast of excellent actors led by Jonathan Harden as “James”, the handler.
