Toby Stephens Jets off!
A brand new play has been written and recorded for Radio 4 entitled 'The Host'.
It stars Toby Stephens as Jet Morgan and David Jacobs as 'The Host'. Charles Chilton also puts in an appearance as The Announcer. It will be broadcast on 27th June at 2.30pm as The Saturday Play.
This follows on from a whole season of science fiction plays on Radios 3, 4 and 7 earlier this year. Radio 4 is quite keen to commission more sci fi as a result of this and the successful "Journey Into Space" revamp / sequel "Frozen in Time" broadcast in 2008. In addition to a new "Journey Into Space", there will also be 3 new "Torchwood" radio plays this summer on the network.
Last year Toby stephens played James Bond in a radio adaption of Dr No based on the original novel by Ian Fleming and broadcast to celebrate the centenary of the author's birth. Toby is perhaps best known for playing the villain in the 20th James Bond film Die Another Day - Sir Gustav Graves a.k.a. Colonel Tan-Sun Moon - the villain who tried to out-cad Bond himself. Toby has also appeared in the British horror movie Severence and Clint Eastwood's Space Cowboys. His televison roles have included Robin Hood, Wired, The Cambridge Spies and Perfect Strangers. He has taken on many more dramatic roles on stage and of course in radio, for which he was the third James Bond. He can be currently seen on stage in Ibsen's A Doll's House (starring alongside Christopher Eccelston and Gillian Anderson).
'The Host' is directed by Nicholas Russell Pavier with music by David Chilton (Charles Chilton's son) who both worked on last year's adventure 'Frozen In Time'. That story is now available on CD and tells of how the 1970s space explorers - Jet, Lemmy, Doc and Mitch - ended up returning to Earth some four decades later.
Radio Four website
Biography and Comprehensive list of Toby Stephens work
Composer's website
Charles Chilton Interview on Radio 7
The Red Planet and The World In Peril have recently been repeated on BBC7. The episodes also found popularity on the BBC iplayer, sometimes even coming fourth in the chart for radio for a particular day - beaten only by the likes of Chris Moyles, Wogan and The Archers!
Space Force is being repeated.
And so is an interview with Charles Chilton. This originally accompanied the three hour omnibus repeats of Space Force on BBC7 in April 2006. "A Short Journey Into Space Force... with Charles Chilton" continues on Saturdays at 6.30pm and Sundays at 0.30am! Each episode of the shortened version is ten minutes long and there are eight episodes in total.
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