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Classic Serial

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Classic Serial: Now, Voyager

Now, Voyager

16/05/2010

BBC Radio 4 - Classic Serial, Now, Voyager

By Olive Higgins Prouty. A dowdy, frustrated spinster embarks on a doomed love affair.

By Olive Higgins Prouty, dramatised by Neville Teller. A dowdy, frustrated spinster takes the psychiatric cure, voyages forth and embarks on a doomed love affair.

A dowdy, frustrated spinster from a wealthy New England family, living with her overpowering mother in the stiflingly repressive Boston of the inter-war years, suffers a nervous breakdown after an unhappy love affair. 

Partially restored under the wise guidance of a psychiatrist, she is urged by her fashionably elegant sister-in-law to have a beauty makeover and to undertake a Mediterranean cruise. Physically transformed, she meets on board an architect, Jerry Durrance, with whom slowly, as she gains confidence in her new image, she falls in love. But he is married with children he loves, and the affair cannot have a happy ending. 

Circumstances lead her to form a special bond with his vulnerable 12-year-old daughter, and finally she settles for a loving relationship with him and the child. The famous last line, of both the film and the book, is: "Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars!"

Cast
Charlotte ..... Sarah Lancashire
Jerry ..... Anthony Head 
Mother ..... Joan Plowright 
Lisa ..... Lysette Anthony
Jaquith ..... John Rowe 
Dora ..... Debora Weston
Mack ..... Sam Douglas 
Giuseppe ..... Nunzio Caponio 
Tina ..... Elisha Mansuroglu 
Miss Trask ..... Joanna McCallum 
Lloyd ..... Jon Glover
Hilda ..... Alice Hart

Based on the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty. 
Dramatised by Neville Teller. 
Directed by Andy Jordan.

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