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Resistance
Gina McKee stars in this chilling apocalyptic radio drama by award-winning writer Val McDermid.
It’s the Summer Solstice weekend, and 150,000 people have descended on a farm in the North East of England for an open-air music festival. Reporting on the event is journalist Zoe Meadows, who files her copy from a food van run by her friends Sam and Lisa.
When some of Sam’s customers get sick, it looks like food poisoning, and it’s exacerbated by the mud, rain and inadequate sanitary facilities. It’s assumed to be a 24-hour thing, until people get home and discover strange skin lesions, which ulcerate and turn septic. More people start getting ill – and dying.
What looked like a minor bug is clearly much more serious: a mystery illness that’s spreading fast and seems resistant to all antibiotics. Zoe teams up with Sam to track the outbreak to its source; meanwhile, can a cure be found before the disease becomes a pandemic?
From a No 1 bestselling author, this original drama envisages a nightmare scenario that seems only too credible in our modern age.
Duration: 2 hours 30 mins approx.
It’s the Summer Solstice weekend, and 150,000 people have descended on a farm in the North East of England for an open-air music festival. Reporting on the event is journalist Zoe Meadows, who files her copy from a food van run by her friends Sam and Lisa.
When some of Sam’s customers get sick, it looks like food poisoning, and it’s exacerbated by the mud, rain and inadequate sanitary facilities. It’s assumed to be a 24-hour thing, until people get home and discover strange skin lesions, which ulcerate and turn septic. More people start getting ill – and dying.
What looked like a minor bug is clearly much more serious: a mystery illness that’s spreading fast and seems resistant to all antibiotics. Zoe teams up with Sam to track the outbreak to its source; meanwhile, can a cure be found before the disease becomes a pandemic?
From a No 1 bestselling author, this original drama envisages a nightmare scenario that seems only too credible in our modern age.
Duration: 2 hours 30 mins approx.
3 pages, Audio CD
First published May 20, 2021
2 people are currently reading
137 people want to read
About the author
Val McDermid
342 books5,320 followersVal McDermid is a No. 1 bestseller whose novels have been translated into more than thirty languages, and have sold over eleven million copies.
She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. She was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009 and was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for 2010. In 2011 she received the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award.
She writes full time and divides her time between Cheshire and Edinburgh.
She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. She was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009 and was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for 2010. In 2011 she received the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award.
She writes full time and divides her time between Cheshire and Edinburgh.
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March 31, 2017
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08g7y1lBBC episode descriptions:
Part 1. It's the Solstice music festival, when 150,000 people descend on a farm in the North-East for the open-air event of the summer. The audience pours in from all over the UK and beyond. The artistes come from all round the globe. The journalists likewise.
Among the hacks is Zoe Meadows, who has left her husband Jamie and two small children at home to watch the event on TV. For really, if you weren't working, who would actually want to be there, partying for a weekend without adequate sanitary facilities on what is, at its heart, an agricultural site?
You wouldn't go hungry, though. Well, you might if you thought too closely about those hundreds of food stalls desperate to keep their costs down, not asking too many questions of their meat suppliers, not really caring whether those hand-crafted pork sausages are from pigs stuffed full of antibiotics on the intensive farming unit they came from. One of those food stalls is Sam's Sausage Sandwiches, run by Sam and Lisa Shore.
Zoe owes them a great deal. Since becoming a mother and wanting fewer hours she has taken a step back from investigative journalism and has settled for covering the softer stories such as Solstice. Even this wouldn't have been possible without Sam and Lisa who stepped in to look after the kids when both her and Jamie were working...
Part 2 . A mystery disease seems to be spreading and nobody's quite sure how it's travelling. Is it in the air we breathe? Is it in the water we drink ? Is it in the food we eat?
Zoe is trying to get an interview with Aasmah about the research that's being funded into the disease. But Aasmah's not talking, on orders from above. Politics has entered the game. Barry Tomlinson is the chief of Public Health in England. He's a desperately worried man. He persuades the Minister that it's time for a crisis meeting. Politicians hate the word 'crisis' unless they're well on the way to solving it, so the minister is determined not to make a big deal out of it.
Meanwhile, Josef Nowak is facing a nightmare at the pig farm. His animals are dying and nothing the vet can do is helping.
Zoe and Jamie talk about what they might do to avoid being caught up in the epidemic. His aunt has a smallholding in the Welsh mountains; they could load the car up with tins and dried food and hole up there till the worst has passed. Zoe is torn between wanting to protect them and wanting to be a good journalist and get to the heart of what's going on.
Part 3. Scientists in Germany think they've found an antibiotic that's effective against Zips. Human trials have been accelerated.The horror is out there and growing. The countryside has become a smoking pyre. Government ministers sit in a crisis meeting and they simply don't know what to do.
News reports start to break up and then disappear. Aasmah in her lab talks about the grim prospects with a colleague. It's clear that some countries have collapsed completely. Civil society is starting to break down. There have been food riots in some cities. The dead are beginning to back up in the streets. Other diseases are flaring up because of the decay and decomposition.
Zoe Gina McKee
Jamie Jason Done
Sam Nitin Kundra
Lisa Angela Lonsdale
Baz Henry Devas
Will Ashley Margolis
Tina Verity-May Henry
Dr Adamson Verity-May Henry
James Jonathan Keeble
Nowak Jonathan Keeble
Director Susan Roberts
March 6, 2019
ABOUT THIS AUDIOBOOK: It's the summer solstice weekend, and 150,000 people have descended on a farm in the northeast of England for an open-air music festival. Reporting on the event is journalist Zoe Meadows, who files her copy from a food van run by her friends Sam and Lisa.
When some of Sam's customers get sick, it looks like food poisoning, and it's exacerbated by the mud, rain and inadequate sanitary facilities. It's assumed to be a 24-hour thing until people get home and discover strange skin lesions, which ulcerate and turn septic. More people start getting ill - and dying.
What looked like a minor bug is clearly much more serious: a mystery illness that's spreading fast and seems resistant to all antibiotics. Zoe teams up with Sam to track the outbreak to its source; meanwhile, can a cure be found before the disease becomes a pandemic?
MY THOUGHTS: I went into this audiobook entirely blind. It definitely was not what I was expecting, but by the time I realised that this was not McDermid's normal 'crime' fare, I did not have time to download anything else to listen to. This is not something I would have listened to by choice but, having said that, it was a reasonable story, well written and narrated, and - the scariest thing of all - entirely possible.
😨😨😨
THE AUTHOR: Val McDermid is a No. 1 bestseller whose novels have been translated into more than thirty languages, and have sold over eleven million copies.
She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. She was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009 and was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for 2010. In 2011 she received the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award.
She writes full time and divides her time between Cheshire and Edinburgh.
DISCLOSURE: I listened to the audiobook version of Resistance by Val McDermid, the original BBC Radio 4 radio drama full cast recording, published by BBC Worldwide Ltd. The quality was, as always, excellent. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.
Please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com for an explanation of my rating system. This review and others are also published on my webpage https://sandysbookaday.wordpress.com/...
When some of Sam's customers get sick, it looks like food poisoning, and it's exacerbated by the mud, rain and inadequate sanitary facilities. It's assumed to be a 24-hour thing until people get home and discover strange skin lesions, which ulcerate and turn septic. More people start getting ill - and dying.
What looked like a minor bug is clearly much more serious: a mystery illness that's spreading fast and seems resistant to all antibiotics. Zoe teams up with Sam to track the outbreak to its source; meanwhile, can a cure be found before the disease becomes a pandemic?
MY THOUGHTS: I went into this audiobook entirely blind. It definitely was not what I was expecting, but by the time I realised that this was not McDermid's normal 'crime' fare, I did not have time to download anything else to listen to. This is not something I would have listened to by choice but, having said that, it was a reasonable story, well written and narrated, and - the scariest thing of all - entirely possible.
😨😨😨
THE AUTHOR: Val McDermid is a No. 1 bestseller whose novels have been translated into more than thirty languages, and have sold over eleven million copies.
She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. She was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009 and was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for 2010. In 2011 she received the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award.
She writes full time and divides her time between Cheshire and Edinburgh.
DISCLOSURE: I listened to the audiobook version of Resistance by Val McDermid, the original BBC Radio 4 radio drama full cast recording, published by BBC Worldwide Ltd. The quality was, as always, excellent. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.
Please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com for an explanation of my rating system. This review and others are also published on my webpage https://sandysbookaday.wordpress.com/...
June 17, 2017
Public health warning...
It's summer festival season, and a crowd of thousands has descended on a farmer's field for an open-air rock concert celebrating the solstice. There are all the usual food vendors offering varying degrees of quality and hygiene so it's not too surprising when there's an outbreak of what appears to be food poisoning. But although sufferers seem to recover within twenty-four hours, days or weeks later they begin to have relapses, developing skin lesions and eventually dying. And in the meantime, they've dispersed all over Britain and the world, spreading the infection...
The story is told by Zoe Meadows (Gina McKee), a journalist who happened to be on the spot at the concert when the first outbreak occurred. Though not infected herself, she sniffs a story and sets out to investigate how the infection began. Soon she begins to suspect a factory farm which uses particularly inhumane methods of housing its animals may be the source. Meantime, scientists are working round the clock to find a cure. Zoe makes contact with one of them, Aasmah, who explains that existing antibiotics aren't strong enough to fight this disease. It has mutated to a point of being resistant to everything scientists have to throw at it.
Isn't it odd how something that should work sometimes simply doesn't? This has a great cast who all turn in top class performances, many of them with lovely, authentic Geordie accents (though not broad enough to be hard to understand). It's written by Val McDermid which means that the script flows and sounds natural – the dialogue never feels stilted. The production values are great – listening through headphones made me feel I was in the middle of it as the sound shifted around me, the incidental music is suitably ominous and threatening, and the sound effects - dogs barking, street noises, etc. - are so convincing I several times found myself checking they were coming from the disc and not the real world. The science is totally credible and so is the eventual outcome – horrific but believable.
And therein lies the problem. Perhaps there's somebody out there who's not aware that overuse of antibiotics has led to a situation where some bacteria have mutated to the point where they've developed resistance, leading to a cycle of ever stronger drugs, more mutations, and round and round we go, with no certainty that humanity will be the eventual winner. Maybe some people don't know that they should stop pestering their doctors for antibiotics every time they have a sniffle. Maybe there are some doctors who are still too wimpy to say no to such patients. But, a little like this paragraph, this drama feels more like a public health warning than anything else. A well written and well performed public health warning, but still...
When it said at the end that it was “developed through the Wellcome Trust Experimental Stories scheme”, my suspicions were further aroused, since the Wellcome Trust is a scientific research charity. I donned my deerstalker, lit my pipe and turned to Google. And indeed – this is a series in which they encourage writers to dramatise matters of scientific concern in an attempt to inform and engage the public. Very worthy, but unfortunately that's what it sounds like in the end. Because the basic plan is to show us how, if we don't start behaving, we will all die. Die! Die, I tell you! True, but hardly entertaining.
An extract from the BBC's webpage on the drama says:
Programme consultant Christopher Dowson, who is Professor of Microbiology at the University of Warwick and Trustee for the charity Antibiotic Research UK says: “This fantastic production presents in an emotionally engaging manner some of the important issues that have given rise to our current predicament – ever rising resistance and fewer effective antibiotics. My hope is that listeners will go on to ask ‘what can I do to be part of the solution?’.”
OK, fine, Professor Dowson, but just two points. Firstly, it started emotionally engaging but rapidly descended into being simply downright depressing. And secondly, it would have been great if it had suggested answers to the question “what can I do to be part of the solution?” rather than implying that there is no solution and no hope and that we're all going to die. Die! Die, I tell you! And if that's not bad enough, apparently we're all going to come out in purple spots first!
Maybe I'm being unfair. I did work in health care for many years, so maybe the antibiotics issue isn't as widely known amongst the general public as I think. But even so, I suspect what most people will say at the end is “Well, that was depressing!” and head for the cake tin rather than becoming activists. Perhaps when it appeared on the radio it was accompanied by discussion programmes that may have answered the “what can I do?” question but as a standalone on disc it preaches without advising, offering despair unleavened by hope. A missed opportunity and, frankly, a bit of a waste of a great writer and an excellent cast. 2½ stars for me, so rounded up.
NB This CD set was provided for review by Amazon Vine UK. It's a three disc set with a running time of 2 hours 30 minutes. It's also available on Audible.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
It's summer festival season, and a crowd of thousands has descended on a farmer's field for an open-air rock concert celebrating the solstice. There are all the usual food vendors offering varying degrees of quality and hygiene so it's not too surprising when there's an outbreak of what appears to be food poisoning. But although sufferers seem to recover within twenty-four hours, days or weeks later they begin to have relapses, developing skin lesions and eventually dying. And in the meantime, they've dispersed all over Britain and the world, spreading the infection...
The story is told by Zoe Meadows (Gina McKee), a journalist who happened to be on the spot at the concert when the first outbreak occurred. Though not infected herself, she sniffs a story and sets out to investigate how the infection began. Soon she begins to suspect a factory farm which uses particularly inhumane methods of housing its animals may be the source. Meantime, scientists are working round the clock to find a cure. Zoe makes contact with one of them, Aasmah, who explains that existing antibiotics aren't strong enough to fight this disease. It has mutated to a point of being resistant to everything scientists have to throw at it.
Isn't it odd how something that should work sometimes simply doesn't? This has a great cast who all turn in top class performances, many of them with lovely, authentic Geordie accents (though not broad enough to be hard to understand). It's written by Val McDermid which means that the script flows and sounds natural – the dialogue never feels stilted. The production values are great – listening through headphones made me feel I was in the middle of it as the sound shifted around me, the incidental music is suitably ominous and threatening, and the sound effects - dogs barking, street noises, etc. - are so convincing I several times found myself checking they were coming from the disc and not the real world. The science is totally credible and so is the eventual outcome – horrific but believable.
And therein lies the problem. Perhaps there's somebody out there who's not aware that overuse of antibiotics has led to a situation where some bacteria have mutated to the point where they've developed resistance, leading to a cycle of ever stronger drugs, more mutations, and round and round we go, with no certainty that humanity will be the eventual winner. Maybe some people don't know that they should stop pestering their doctors for antibiotics every time they have a sniffle. Maybe there are some doctors who are still too wimpy to say no to such patients. But, a little like this paragraph, this drama feels more like a public health warning than anything else. A well written and well performed public health warning, but still...
When it said at the end that it was “developed through the Wellcome Trust Experimental Stories scheme”, my suspicions were further aroused, since the Wellcome Trust is a scientific research charity. I donned my deerstalker, lit my pipe and turned to Google. And indeed – this is a series in which they encourage writers to dramatise matters of scientific concern in an attempt to inform and engage the public. Very worthy, but unfortunately that's what it sounds like in the end. Because the basic plan is to show us how, if we don't start behaving, we will all die. Die! Die, I tell you! True, but hardly entertaining.
An extract from the BBC's webpage on the drama says:
Programme consultant Christopher Dowson, who is Professor of Microbiology at the University of Warwick and Trustee for the charity Antibiotic Research UK says: “This fantastic production presents in an emotionally engaging manner some of the important issues that have given rise to our current predicament – ever rising resistance and fewer effective antibiotics. My hope is that listeners will go on to ask ‘what can I do to be part of the solution?’.”
OK, fine, Professor Dowson, but just two points. Firstly, it started emotionally engaging but rapidly descended into being simply downright depressing. And secondly, it would have been great if it had suggested answers to the question “what can I do to be part of the solution?” rather than implying that there is no solution and no hope and that we're all going to die. Die! Die, I tell you! And if that's not bad enough, apparently we're all going to come out in purple spots first!
Maybe I'm being unfair. I did work in health care for many years, so maybe the antibiotics issue isn't as widely known amongst the general public as I think. But even so, I suspect what most people will say at the end is “Well, that was depressing!” and head for the cake tin rather than becoming activists. Perhaps when it appeared on the radio it was accompanied by discussion programmes that may have answered the “what can I do?” question but as a standalone on disc it preaches without advising, offering despair unleavened by hope. A missed opportunity and, frankly, a bit of a waste of a great writer and an excellent cast. 2½ stars for me, so rounded up.
NB This CD set was provided for review by Amazon Vine UK. It's a three disc set with a running time of 2 hours 30 minutes. It's also available on Audible.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
April 1, 2017
From BBC Radio 4 - Dangerous Visions:
Part 1. It's the Solstice music festival, when 150,000 people descend on a farm in the North-East for the open-air event of the summer. The audience pours in from all over the UK and beyond. The artistes come from all round the globe. The journalists likewise.
Among the hacks is Zoe Meadows, who has left her husband Jamie and two small children at home to watch the event on TV. For really, if you weren't working, who would actually want to be there, partying for a weekend without adequate sanitary facilities on what is, at its heart, an agricultural site?
You wouldn't go hungry, though. Well, you might if you thought too closely about those hundreds of food stalls desperate to keep their costs down, not asking too many questions of their meat suppliers, not really caring whether those hand-crafted pork sausages are from pigs stuffed full of antibiotics on the intensive farming unit they came from. One of those food stalls is Sam's Sausage Sandwiches, run by Sam and Lisa Shore.
Zoe owes them a great deal. Since becoming a mother and wanting fewer hours she has taken a step back from investigative journalism and has settled for covering the softer stories such as Solstice. Even this wouldn't have been possible without Sam and Lisa who stepped in to look after the kids when both her and Jamie were working...
Part 2 . A mystery disease seems to be spreading and nobody's quite sure how it's travelling. Is it in the air we breathe? Is it in the water we drink ? Is it in the food we eat?
Part 3. Scientists in Germany think they've found an antibiotic that's effective against Zips. Human trials have been accelerated.The horror is out there and growing. The countryside has become a smoking pyre. Government ministers sit in a crisis meeting and they simply don't know what to do.
Resistance was written by Val McDermid
Directed in Salford by Susan Roberts
Programme consultant - Christopher Dowson Professor of Microbiology, University of Warwick and Trustee for Antibiotic Research UK.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08g7y1l
Part 1. It's the Solstice music festival, when 150,000 people descend on a farm in the North-East for the open-air event of the summer. The audience pours in from all over the UK and beyond. The artistes come from all round the globe. The journalists likewise.
Among the hacks is Zoe Meadows, who has left her husband Jamie and two small children at home to watch the event on TV. For really, if you weren't working, who would actually want to be there, partying for a weekend without adequate sanitary facilities on what is, at its heart, an agricultural site?
You wouldn't go hungry, though. Well, you might if you thought too closely about those hundreds of food stalls desperate to keep their costs down, not asking too many questions of their meat suppliers, not really caring whether those hand-crafted pork sausages are from pigs stuffed full of antibiotics on the intensive farming unit they came from. One of those food stalls is Sam's Sausage Sandwiches, run by Sam and Lisa Shore.
Zoe owes them a great deal. Since becoming a mother and wanting fewer hours she has taken a step back from investigative journalism and has settled for covering the softer stories such as Solstice. Even this wouldn't have been possible without Sam and Lisa who stepped in to look after the kids when both her and Jamie were working...
Part 2 . A mystery disease seems to be spreading and nobody's quite sure how it's travelling. Is it in the air we breathe? Is it in the water we drink ? Is it in the food we eat?
Part 3. Scientists in Germany think they've found an antibiotic that's effective against Zips. Human trials have been accelerated.The horror is out there and growing. The countryside has become a smoking pyre. Government ministers sit in a crisis meeting and they simply don't know what to do.
Resistance was written by Val McDermid
Directed in Salford by Susan Roberts
Programme consultant - Christopher Dowson Professor of Microbiology, University of Warwick and Trustee for Antibiotic Research UK.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08g7y1l
June 17, 2021
See review of graphic novel version: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
March 6, 2020
OMG I am listening to this book in March 2020 in Australia. The world is experiencing Coronavirus. Supermarkets are running out of staples due to panic buying. Travel has been restricted and people are being quarantined. Large events are being cancelled.
This is what is actually happening in the world today.
It is also what is happening in this book.
What does Val McDermid know!
This is like listening to our local news, unbelievable
This is what is actually happening in the world today.
It is also what is happening in this book.
What does Val McDermid know!
This is like listening to our local news, unbelievable
October 26, 2017
A short BBC play about an apocalyptic scenario when a bacterium becomes resistant to all antibiotics. I found this unsatisfying with too little explanation and backstory, where we'd go, for example, from somebody falling ill to being buried with hardly any detail. It felt full of holes and too insubstantial to be bothered with. It also read as a long polemic against meat eating with loud, strident opinions being shouted at me which made me want to ignore the message. I thought the conversations were often unnatural and forced and the characters unconvincing. I really wouldn't recomend this work.
July 3, 2022
3.5 stars This is a radio play not a novel. It’s a full cast, well produced and well acted play, a bit over 2 hours long. It’s an apocalyptic/ post-apocalyptic medical story. Written in 2017, it is interesting in terms of covid and the world’s unpreparedness when it hit.
January 11, 2018
Listened to in audio format.
Journalist and mother of two Zoe Meadows is covering the Solstice music festival. Like most crowded events there were broken portaloos and stalls offering partially cooked burgers. Zoe stayed with her friends Sam and Lisa Shore who were at the festival with their food van Sam's Sausage Sandwiches.
The following morning people were hit with a 24 hour bug, all the victims had eaten at Sam's Sausage Sandwiches the day before. The next day people were recovering and it was put down to food poisoning. However over subsequent days the victim's of the poisoning outbreak were being afflicted by sores and dying. Eventually it spread to people who were not at Solstice. Scientists claim it is not food poisonng but a virus called ZIPS which is an antibiotic resistant virus.
Panicked locals start blaming Sam for the deaths and set his van and house on fire. Zoe knows her fiends would never buy dodgy meat, she decides to visit the farm where Sam bought his sausage meat. At the farm Zoe finds the pigs sick and in crowded conditions, the farmer threatens Zoe and she decides to dig deeper. What Zoe finds is underfunded government labs and a political cover up.
Resistance was gripping but it was based on a worst case scenario. The production was well done with a great cast.
Journalist and mother of two Zoe Meadows is covering the Solstice music festival. Like most crowded events there were broken portaloos and stalls offering partially cooked burgers. Zoe stayed with her friends Sam and Lisa Shore who were at the festival with their food van Sam's Sausage Sandwiches.
The following morning people were hit with a 24 hour bug, all the victims had eaten at Sam's Sausage Sandwiches the day before. The next day people were recovering and it was put down to food poisoning. However over subsequent days the victim's of the poisoning outbreak were being afflicted by sores and dying. Eventually it spread to people who were not at Solstice. Scientists claim it is not food poisonng but a virus called ZIPS which is an antibiotic resistant virus.
Panicked locals start blaming Sam for the deaths and set his van and house on fire. Zoe knows her fiends would never buy dodgy meat, she decides to visit the farm where Sam bought his sausage meat. At the farm Zoe finds the pigs sick and in crowded conditions, the farmer threatens Zoe and she decides to dig deeper. What Zoe finds is underfunded government labs and a political cover up.
Resistance was gripping but it was based on a worst case scenario. The production was well done with a great cast.
February 4, 2019
Great production with a full cast, I love a good apocalyptic story, that this one was set in the UK was even better and so topical, scary stuff!
December 20, 2019
This was an enjoyable listen, like listening to a telemovie. The problem that is outlined here sounds very realistic, from the overuse of antibiotics, to the bacteria's resistance, to the problems with funding and the government's response. The one major flaw where I felt it didn't make sense was the focus on Sam's Sausages. If the factory piggery was the source, many more butchers etc would have been affected. This was a major distraction for me and took a star off.
May 6, 2017
Loved this dramatic audio play about the outcome of a world where antibiotics can no longer cure disease. Would love to listen to more of these! Good job, BBC!
August 4, 2017
Gripping is right! A realistically possible and very scary scenario. Brilliantly performed with a couple of gut wrenching moments.
December 23, 2017
Brilliant audiobook with full cast recording.
May 19, 2018
A prophetic tale of impending doom as surviviors struggle to stay alive whilst authorities fail to act (in their own self interest), leading to virtual wipeout.
November 6, 2021
Yikes! This is the cautionary tale for today! An antibiotic resistant swine flu-type disease starts spreading at an outdoor music festival, is carried home to the four corners of the earth, starts mutating and killing the animal kingdom. If you’re on the edge of becoming a vegan, this may topple you over the edge.
July 27, 2021
Listened. BBC Sounds.
November 13, 2023
Bleak AF and entirely believeable, and yet still not enough to make me a vegan...
This is an 'audiobook' of a BBC radio drama and probably suffers due to being only 2 hours long meaning a lack of detail and things escalating super quickly.
This is an 'audiobook' of a BBC radio drama and probably suffers due to being only 2 hours long meaning a lack of detail and things escalating super quickly.
April 14, 2017
Resistance is a fun little apocalypse tale from the Queen of Crime. It’s super short at barely over two hours long, but it began life as a radio drama in three 45 minute segments, so was never intended to be a full-length feature.
The story follows frustrated journalist Zoe, whose serious stories have fallen out of favour in a market saturated by gossip rags and tabloid trash. She has the (mis)fortune of being at the centre of a breaking crisis, when a solstice festival becomes the breeding ground for a deadly new disease.
Despite its diminutive stature, Resistance never feels rushed. Although barely any time passes between Zoe conducting interviews at the festival, and finding herself digging garden graves to save the six week wait at the crematorium, the links between these events are well-covered in satisfying snippets.
All told, I would have loved to have listened to this as a true audiobook, but what it delivered was still a sufficiently splendid way to spend an evening.
[Review originally published on my blog at Line After Line.]
The story follows frustrated journalist Zoe, whose serious stories have fallen out of favour in a market saturated by gossip rags and tabloid trash. She has the (mis)fortune of being at the centre of a breaking crisis, when a solstice festival becomes the breeding ground for a deadly new disease.
Despite its diminutive stature, Resistance never feels rushed. Although barely any time passes between Zoe conducting interviews at the festival, and finding herself digging garden graves to save the six week wait at the crematorium, the links between these events are well-covered in satisfying snippets.
All told, I would have loved to have listened to this as a true audiobook, but what it delivered was still a sufficiently splendid way to spend an evening.
[Review originally published on my blog at Line After Line.]
September 20, 2018
A music festival is held in a paddock usually occupied by pigs from the local factory farm. It rains and more than a few people get some kind of gastric bug. By the time people realise it’s more than a gastric thing, the performers and crew have all travelled far from the site, back to homes and tours in other countries.
Far from the outbreak site of an antibiotic resistant plague.
Uh oh.
***
Oh boy. This has the aura of believability. Especially given the change in pharmaceutical companies to be profit driven rather than health driven. As one expert says, the companies want people to use daily dose medicine; stetins, diabetes, heart meds, and so on. The speed of the infection means you die or you don’t ever get it.
Zoe is a journalist and vegetarian who was covering the music festival. Her friend Sam’s food truck is the initial source of the outbreak.
They are the patients zero.
This is a kind of sci-fi post apoc thing. No happy endings here. And being a BBC production the acting is first class.
4 stars
Far from the outbreak site of an antibiotic resistant plague.
Uh oh.
***
Oh boy. This has the aura of believability. Especially given the change in pharmaceutical companies to be profit driven rather than health driven. As one expert says, the companies want people to use daily dose medicine; stetins, diabetes, heart meds, and so on. The speed of the infection means you die or you don’t ever get it.
Zoe is a journalist and vegetarian who was covering the music festival. Her friend Sam’s food truck is the initial source of the outbreak.
They are the patients zero.
This is a kind of sci-fi post apoc thing. No happy endings here. And being a BBC production the acting is first class.
4 stars
October 24, 2018
I downloaded it from the radio,and glad I did. It was a dystopian vision of a world were antibiotics fail.The play argues that inaction by world governments allows the virus to spread.Capitalism and the fear of a meat supplier loosing his money is the probable source. A scapegoat has to be found and the naive belief that it a take away vender who caused the problem.The play lets us know as to why the virus mutated,and why there was no known vaccine developed in time. The plays great strength is that it focuses on the effects of this plague on the few people who are immune. The loss of families, and the horror of then being unable to bury ones loved ones is moving. An audio play one that I fully recommend
September 7, 2017
This short BBC Radio 4 play by Val McDermid is a slight deviation from her normal work but takes a great turn. The play follows an outbreak of antibiotic resistant disease, and is a worryingly prescient tale.
April 24, 2018
yikes! I'm going to join the local transition town group and get working on my garden.
October 7, 2018
Frighteningly real in its depiction and potential, and as well researched and written as you would expect from Ms McDiarmid. Highly recommended.
January 8, 2019
Looking back now, sadly none of the characters stayed with me.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 2, 2021
A virus (that turns out to be an antibiotic-resistant bacteria) jumps from animals to humans. Doctors at first treat it lightly. Deaths ramp up and then drop to near zero. Scientists keep changing their story about whether the deadly illness is coming or going.
Sound mostly familiar - kinda like a SVU episode; "ripped from the headlines."
Well, one thing that differed in "Resistance" from the history of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. is that it's a journalist who pushes and pushes and pushes to find out what's really going on and how to really help humanity.
While the antibiotic-resistant illness takes the story in an extinction-level dystopian direction (which is the worth reading part of the book) this book made me wonder how the course of COVID-19 in 2020 would have been diifferent if reporters in 2020 had actually helped protect human life instead of ensuring that only approved narratives were seen and then ret-conning (happening now in 2021) when the approved narrative changed. As a scientist in the book says, "it's all politics now."
Sound mostly familiar - kinda like a SVU episode; "ripped from the headlines."
Well, one thing that differed in "Resistance" from the history of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. is that it's a journalist who pushes and pushes and pushes to find out what's really going on and how to really help humanity.
While the antibiotic-resistant illness takes the story in an extinction-level dystopian direction (which is the worth reading part of the book) this book made me wonder how the course of COVID-19 in 2020 would have been diifferent if reporters in 2020 had actually helped protect human life instead of ensuring that only approved narratives were seen and then ret-conning (happening now in 2021) when the approved narrative changed. As a scientist in the book says, "it's all politics now."
June 15, 2020
I chose this book on the Libby app because I needed an audio book to see me through until my audible credit renewed and I could purchase a new audio book. In hindsight, listening to this during the current pandemic perhaps wasn’t wise!
After finishing this, I had to check the publication date because so many parts of it hit close to home - talk of pandemics becoming political, suggesting those developing the virus would self isolate, talk of lock downs and quarantines. Aside from how the pandemic starts, this could easily have been written about Coronavirus.
The only part of this which I struggled with is blaming Sausage Man Sam for the outbreak - if the cause was the meat, then others supplied by the same company would have had similar issues.
This is a relatively short audiobook but if you feel anxious about the current pandemic, I’d suggest you wait to listen to this!
After finishing this, I had to check the publication date because so many parts of it hit close to home - talk of pandemics becoming political, suggesting those developing the virus would self isolate, talk of lock downs and quarantines. Aside from how the pandemic starts, this could easily have been written about Coronavirus.
The only part of this which I struggled with is blaming Sausage Man Sam for the outbreak - if the cause was the meat, then others supplied by the same company would have had similar issues.
This is a relatively short audiobook but if you feel anxious about the current pandemic, I’d suggest you wait to listen to this!
May 4, 2022
I listened to the audio version of this book and gosh, I had to keep listening until the end! Zoe is a journalist who went to cover the Summer Solstice festival. Whilst there, some of the festival-goers started getting sick, and it was suspected food poisoning (made worse by festival conditions). It appeared to be a 24 hour thing so no-one thought too much of it until afterwards, when people started getting skin lesions that couldn't be explained- or treated. People started dying. Including Zoe's family. It became more than just a story for the press, it became about survival.
This is gripping, harrowing and thought provoking (especially since the covid pandemic). It was very well narrated on the audio version, which certainly added to the atmosphere. A must listen!!
This is gripping, harrowing and thought provoking (especially since the covid pandemic). It was very well narrated on the audio version, which certainly added to the atmosphere. A must listen!!
August 23, 2020
A pretty good made-for-radio dramatization of a pandemic thriller. Anybody who listened to it before March 2020 will have found it entertaining; anybody who, as I did, listened to it in the summer of 2020 will be going "but that's not realistic, what about a lockdown?" And anybody who listens to it a few years after the 2020 pandemic will know how THAT ends and will have a different reaction altogether. Which just goes to show that truth is stranger than fiction.
I was definitely entertained. My one gripe was that I wish they'd stripped the radio intro and outro from in between the episodes. It would have been so much better to have listened to this in one gulp.
I was definitely entertained. My one gripe was that I wish they'd stripped the radio intro and outro from in between the episodes. It would have been so much better to have listened to this in one gulp.
June 17, 2021
I'm not a great audio book person but this sounded interesting.
Oh wow what a book I was hooked from the first word to the last and rather than just listen when out having a walk I sat and listened.
Everything about this was chilling believable and frightening in a real could happen way.
The atmosphere and the way the book was presented was so incredible.
On a downside though if our pandemic has got to you I would not recommend you listen to this just yet as the opening part is super scary and a not unrealistic possibility.
I bow down to Ms McDermid her books never fail to deliver but this one will stay with me forever.
Oh wow what a book I was hooked from the first word to the last and rather than just listen when out having a walk I sat and listened.
Everything about this was chilling believable and frightening in a real could happen way.
The atmosphere and the way the book was presented was so incredible.
On a downside though if our pandemic has got to you I would not recommend you listen to this just yet as the opening part is super scary and a not unrealistic possibility.
I bow down to Ms McDermid her books never fail to deliver but this one will stay with me forever.
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