BBC4 - Simon Gray's superb "Little Nell" - do not miss it.

The sheer quantity of drama produced on BBC Radio is astonishing, as is the consistently high standard of production . That this fertile seed bed cannot be translated to the visual medium of TV is a mystery any license payer must consider when preparing to pay up - fearful of the database, that will hound them if they fail.

Yesterday afternoon BBC4 repeated Simon Gray's "Litle Nell" , first heard on the wireless radio in 2006 and repeated, in commemoration of the author's life. He died on August 7th - not from lung cancer (he was a heavy and celebrated smoker) but from an abdominal aortic aneurysm. He was 71 and had written 35 plays.

"Little Nell" was later produced on stage by Peter Hall and had a premiere at the Theatre Royal in Bath as part of the Peter Hall Season , in June 2007. A useful review by Alison Vale is available here.

Simon Gray was inspired to write the play by the biography of Charle's Dicken's mistress written by Claire Tomalin (now 75 and married to another prolific British playwright Michael Frayn) of "The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens." ISBN 0-14-012136-6 Amazon for which she was to be awarded in 1990, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

The squalid imbroglio of the lionised Dickens and his seduction of the pretty 18 year old "actress" , her life in the shadows, his death and her subsequent marriage in which she succeeded in baffling her husband by mislaying her year of birth by a decade make a wicked tale of Victorian public piety and private sin.

The cast are all magnificent, but Monica Dolan as Nelly Ternan must make any married man longing for a lively bit on the side think again. As the wronged and kept woman she certainly made poor Dicken's pay for his sinful pleasures.

There is, as ever on BBC drama, some fine incidental parlour music from Charlotte Brennan.

You can listen again here for a week (Please note : sighs and sounds of a sexual nature which might arouse some sensitive souls)

There is a handy and brief biography of Nelly Ternan at billgreenwell.com ,one of a fascinating series of "Lost Lives" Also commended is the Postscript "Listen : Do you want to know a secret?"