And the Band Played On Five plays to hum to. 4: Night and Day by Alison Thirkell.
With Julie T Wallace. Marguerite, an actress of large proportions, becomes suspicious when offered a fat fee for a very small part.
Director Philip Martin BBC Pebble Mill. Stereo

Ample opportunity
Actress Julie T Wallace reflects on how demands for the naked truth can lead to a heavy scene
R4 FOUR YEARS AGO Julie T Wallace found fame as BBCtv's statuesque She-Devil, a warts-and-all portrait of a woman wronged, which won her a nomination for a BAFTA Best Actress award and a vote of confidence from outsize women everywhere. Today she makes her radio acting debut in another role that has, she admits, personal reverberations.
Wallace plays Marguerite in Night and Day, an overweight actress who is forced to take stock when she is asked to appear naked in a film. Marguerite has often portrayed jolly fat ladies who are the butt of sexist jokes but when she's asked to strip it's time for her to confront her body. 'Playing her was quite frightening, really, a bit too near to life,' says Wallace, who herself stripped for The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and found the experience traumatic.
But whereas Marguerite's nude scene is the idea of a seedy director, her own was supervised by Philip Saville, the distinguished director of Boys from the Blackstuff. 'Yet the part that people really remember is the scene where the priest makes love to me - and I had my clothes on! It just shows that a bit of imagination is good for sex scenes - don't flash it all, dear!'
There was another outsize character for her in the Bond movie The Living Daylights - 'a Czech agent who crushed a man between her boobs!' - but since then she's appeared in everything from BBC2's Comic Strip to the new film of The Threepenny Opera. 'Sixty per cent of the female population are over size 14 yet we're still made to think that we should be petite and must get down to that all-important size eight,' she says. 'I've learnt that the important thing is to fight to be accepted for what you are.'

(David Gillard)

Thirty-Minute Theatre, 3.00pm Radio 4