Get the garlic! Here comes a sexy new Dracula adaptation, radio review The Gothic Imagination season is looming over BBC radio drama, hence Dracula on Sunday afternoon as the new Classic Serial. I am never sure what Gothic means in this kind of context so I looked it up. "Portentously gloomy or horrifying," said one tome. "Pseudo-medieval," said another. "An English architectural style most recognisable in the Houses of Parliament," said a third. How does that add up for this Dracula? Bram Stoker wrote it in the late 19th century, having been both a civil servant and the personal manager of actor Sir Henry Irving. No doubt he was as much informed by the metaphorical blood-sucking propensities of governments and actor managers as by Vlad the Impaler, legendary 15th-century Wallachian king said to be his original inspiration. Most of us have grown up with Count Dracula, recognising him even when he craftily spells his name backwards in Hammer horror films. We know this monster as well as we know our uncles. We have learned what to do when someone sleeps all day in a coffin or mirrors don't hold his reflection. Hand me a crucifix, get the garlic, pass the stake. It is, therefore, a challenge to any adaptor to make Dracula scary again. Writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz did well here. Actor Nicky Henson did even better. His Count guzzled blood with the kind of lipsmacking relish only heard on Woman's Hour when some visiting cook is handing round fresh chocolate cake. He even made it sexy. But so did his victim, lovely Lucy (Scarlett Brookes), longing for the next visit of the demon lover she calls the man bird, the Earl King, the dream. Lucy is adored by shy Dr Seward (Charles Edwards), engaged to handsome Arthur (Joe Sims), watched over by canny Dr Van Helsing (John Dougall) all of whom transfuse her with blood when she is reduced to waxen pallor by nightly visits from the Count. She tries to resist him. In vain. She loves it really. (Eek! Where have we heard that before?) Part two next week. Love Me Do (Radio 4, Saturday) was a meticulously researched, precisely engineered and brightly acted play set, as you'll have guessed from the title, in 1962, the year The Beatles first made the charts and the world almost went to war. In case you don't remember, the USA was blockading Cuba, the USSR was sending Cuba missiles, the USA told them to stop, they didn't - until the last minute. So here's married Dorothy from Kansas (Miranda Raison), in London to go to an old friend's wedding. There's Shack (Adam James), in US Military Intelligence and looking (so everyone keeps saying) like Gregory Peck's brother. They meet, they fight, they make up and, when the threat of war means there are no planes to get her back to Kansas (where her husband and children are stockpiling food in their nuclear shelter), she moves into his flat. They don't mate. Not until the very last minute, which seemed a long way off. So what about the meticulous research? In every interstice of this interminable piece, Acker Bilk, Chet Baker, Stan Getz and Buddy Holly were on Shack's hi-fi. People made trunk calls, sent telegrams. The new E-type Jaguar cost £2,000. Quaaludes were still safe. The period detail was endlessly accurate, thanks to authors Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran. I just wish their romance had sounded less like an archaeological dig and more like a play. Saturday night's play in Radio 3"s "experimental" slot, The Wire, was Everything Between Us, by David Ireland, made in association with the Tinderbox Theatre in Belfast. It was a dialogue between two sisters. Sandra (Abigail McGibbon) is co-chairing a Northern Irish peace and reconciliation commission. Teeni (Veronica Leer) is sexy, mouthy, missing for 11 years, violent, occasionally mad. Sandra had thought her dead. Teeni is very much alive. You didn't have to be psychic to realise that between them flowed boiling rivers of thought about the harsher realities of peace in the Province. It was scary, astute, bitterly funny, beautifully done. I have written about three new plays today because there suddenly seem to be fewer of them. Four out of five Afternoon Dramas on Radio 4 last week were repeats. Radio drama must take its share of budget cuts, of course. Yet radio is now the last outpost of the BBC regularly to produce the classics, revive significant work, encourage new writers and actors, sustain established ones. Reduce its compass and the output will become as impoverished, formulaic and dependent on foreign imports as that of BBC television. Even in an average week, radio does better than that.