The winds howl, but fiction offers shelter from the storms. Radio fiction — purely by coincidence, I hope, and not because it saw the financial meltdown coming — is suddenly offering sanctuaries to suit all tastes. Foggy, 17th-century Amsterdam tonight launching Radio 3’s autumn drama season with a Jew cursed for heresy and Rembrandt painting The Night Watch rural 1930s Georgia, in the first UK radio production of The Color Purple, starting in Woman’s Hour tomorrow and starring Nadine Marshall; noisy Napoleonic cannonades in the afternoon serial HMS Surprise later, this week; and a secret Vatican conclave on Saturday afternoon.

Saturday also heralds a new run of Radio 3’s slot The Wire, in for which Marshall returns movesfrom the Deep South to play all south London to play all four members of a south London family shattered by grief when the son is killed in a knife attack, thus reprising her virtuoso solo performance in Random at the Royal Court earlier this year. Next week comes sees Owls, the first ever play from the BBC Natural History Unit; The Duchess of Malfi, with Sophie Okonedo, and Flaubert, Agatha Christie, The Irish RM and the usual dollops of Borsetshire.

With a listed all together like this, it you might be tempting to think that there is more radio drama around than ever. This is, of course, not true: the Friday Play on Radio 4 has all but disappeared, with that 9pm slot now used mainly for repeats; Radio 2’s readings are, likewise, now nearly all repeats; World Service drama has been cut from 52 hours a year to 16; and Radio 4, when it gives a (welcome) repeat to the Archive Hour from next January, will also be cutting two reading slots a week. So, because of financial cuts, there is actually less radio drama than a year ago. But Still, the range of slots, formats, and subject matter — grim to comedic — continues to be impressive.

The real criticism to be made of so much radio drama is not what is in the productions, but what does not usually precede them. There is rarely any sort of introduction to help the listener, who is too often plunged straight into a strange and, unfamiliar world and has no idea what is happening. With The Color Purple, for example, unless you have read Alice Walker’s novel or seen Steven Spielberg’s film version, then you will probably be floundering at the start of the 10-part serial tomorrow: no clue as to where

we are, or when, an array of characters talking rapidly in black patois and Southern accents, a 14-year-old girl whom we have hardly met before she gets raped in the first two minutes. The confusion does gradually clear, though I had to listen more than once and do a bit of homework.

Certainly, it would be a pity if anyone fell by the wayside. It took the (white) producer-director Pauline Harris two years to get the rights from Spielberg and Warner Bros, and her production is more true to the book than the antiseptic film. (The lesbianism is much clearer, though still tasteful.)

Several of her cast of mainly black British actors have worked in the USA, America, so manage the accents better than British actors usually would. She uses incidental and gospel music recorded by the famous Alan Lomax in the 1930s. And, although the adaptation (by Patricia Cumper, who wrote the delightful novel One Bright Woman Child) removes many of the letters in favour of dramatised scenes, it does full justice to the themes of violence, forcible separation, tyranny of menfolk, survival and the human spirit that made the original book so monumental. Some sanctuary, to be sure.

paul.donovan@sunday-times.co.uk