🎭 Remains to Be Seen

When the Dead Are Moved, the Living Are Revealed

Series: Saturday Night Theatre
Broadcast: 12 December 1970
Writer: John Hyatt
Genre: Psychological / Moral Drama · English Village Noir

📜 “Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.” — G. K. Chesterton

🖋 A Chestertonian Introduction (Original, in Spirit)
There is something peculiarly unsettling about the movement of bones.
A chair may be moved without complaint, a table without protest—but a body, even one long departed, still seems to possess an opinion. When the dead are disturbed, it is rarely the corpse that causes trouble; it is the conscience of the living that begins to stir.

In tonight’s play, a quiet English village prepares a ceremony of great dignity and even greater discomfort. A saint’s remains are to be transferred elsewhere—an act meant to honor the past. Yet as the plans proceed, the past proves less cooperative than expected.

For when we say that something “remains to be seen,” we usually mean the future. But sometimes it is the past that has not finished looking at us.

🎧 Synopsis
Set in a small English village, Remains to Be Seen unfolds around preparations to transfer the relics of St. Wilfrid from their long-resting place to a cathedral in a nearby city. What should be a solemn and orderly ecclesiastical event instead becomes the catalyst for uneasy revelations, moral disputes, and long-suppressed tensions among the villagers.

As officials, clergy, and locals debate the meaning of the relics—and who has the right to move them—the play quietly probes deeper questions:
Who owns the past?
Can reverence be separated from convenience?
And what happens when honor masks unfinished guilt?

A restrained but powerful drama, the play uses the symbolism of disturbed remains to explore faith, memory, authority, and the human habit of tidying away uncomfortable truths.

🕯 Why This Play Endures
A classic BBC moral drama with restrained tension
Explores tradition vs. modern authority without polemic
Uses religious symbolism to illuminate very human conflicts
Quietly unsettling—proof that the most powerful dramas need no violence at all

📻 About Saturday Night Theatre
For decades, Saturday Night Theatre stood as the BBC’s premier showcase for full-length radio drama—original works, adaptations, and morally serious plays performed with theatrical depth and broadcast intimacy. These productions were designed not merely to entertain, but to leave the listener thinking long after the final silence.

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