The Wind in the Willows: a Weasel’s Tale

A new re-imagining of The Wind in the Willows told from the margins. Set in a timeless, Kenneth Grahame-inspired England, the drama looks up from weasel-height at class, home and who gets to belong when the Wild Wood is being carved up by developers. Narrated by Penelope Wilton, it blends the familiar riverbank world with the pressures of eviction, empty grand houses and power concentrated in a few determined hands.

Kit, a young weasel, is watching her family slide into precarity as the scrubland around their burrow is sold off and the criminal Chief Weasel tightens his grip. With her best friends - Portly the otter and Radar the bat - Kit’s world collides with Mole, Ratty, Badger and other classic characters, while a grand house standing empty becomes a magnet for grievance and opportunity. What follows is a fight not for glory but for a place to live: shifting alliances, contested territory and small acts of care that build a community where suspicion says it cannot exist. A story about who gets to stay, what makes a home, and how belonging is made on the riverbank.

“It’s a brave move to reinterpret such a family classic and dramatist Tom Morton-Smith is to be congratulated for making this work so well … this honours the spirit of the novel while bringing prescient insight on what it mean to be seen as an interloper from a lower class … this is top notch.”

— Anna Jones - Radio Times

“Tom Morton-Smith’s The Wind in the Willows: A Weasel’s Tale reimagines Kenneth Grahame’s classic with a light-handed and moving modern touch.”

— Clair Woodward - The Times

Director: Sasha Yevtushenko

A BBC Studios production

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on the 16th November 2025.

The Man in Black: Flesh

Flesh, episode three of series two, of The Man in Black - an anthology horror series from BBC Radio.

Mattie couldn't stop her wayward son Jamie from going out, but now he's come home bleeding and feverish.

A virus is sweeping the town and the death toll among teenagers is rising. What's worse - they're not staying dead, and they've developed a taste for human flesh.

With Jamie sickening upstairs and her new boyfriend fighting his way across town to be with her, Mattie is soon going to face a terrible choice...

Tom Morton-Smith's chilling tale is introduced by Mark Gatiss as sinister raconteur, The Man in Black.

Horrifying series of tales from The Man in Black. You might meet him at a luggage carousel in an airport, or behind the desk at an employment agency or he might approach you in the corridor of a care home.

Wherever you encounter him, he's eager to pass on his stories. Stories to unsettle and horrify. Stories to haunt you.

Director: Abigail le Fleming

Made for BBC Radio 7 and first broadcast in November 2009.