I know I mention BBC 4 Extra frequently, but name another 24-hour contemporary drama and comedy radio network with such variety.

The 2006 series More Fabulous Flops is hosted by Paul Roseby and first aired in 2006. The fourth and last episode of the series is available online through Friday.

While there’s some research and flair involved, the tone of the show is crass and condescending. Roseby snickers that many of the most egregious Broadway and West End failures were accidents waiting to happen, projects whose fatal  flaws could be perceived way in advance of their openings.

Roseby takes sinister glee in chronicling the pick-failure In My Life at a time when the show was still running. The timing of More Fabulous Flops’ rerun is awkward, since In My Life’s creator Joe Brooks (who suffered a stroke after the show closed) committed suicide this past May, embroiled in a host of charges that he’d lured actresses to his apartment under false pretenses, then raped them.

Still, if you take the show on its own terms, you can’t beat some of the interviews Roseby gets—not just a defiant Brooks but Elaine Stritch, British DJ Mike Read (auteur of a musical about Oscar Wilde) and a range of dishy behind-the-scenesters of the sort which don’t often get quoted in documentaries. Rehearsal accompanists hold grudges too, you know.

The show jibes nicely with a book I just picked up as a “Kindle Single”: A 99-cent quick-read called Great West End Musical Flops. It’s in the spirit of Ken Mandelbaum’s 1992 classic Not Since Carrie—Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops, yet with none of the breadth, authority or bittersweet commentary.

Personally, I feel that flops are overrated. Few shows are uniformly bad, and while the talents of many are involved, they can easily be undone by the whims of individuals, often directors or producers but frequently also costume designers or orchestra leaders. It’s always disappointing to see a complicated team effort completely dismissed, when really its shortcomings should be dissected and studied.

On the other hand, as Roseby demonstrates again and again, “flops” is how theater people themselves assess and discuss shows. It’s their conversational currency. They delight in high-thrills anecdotes of tension and catastrophe. As big as the flops get (Carrie, the famed flop based on the Stephen King novel, is given such special attention on the final episode of the radio series that it’s left out of an earlier episode devoted expressly to horror musicals), everyone in the industry assumes there’s always a bigger one on the horizon.

I hope Roseby doesn’t take that as an invitation to produce a third series of More Fabulous Flops. Though I do wonder how far he’d push at a show like Spider-Man—so costly, and with so many casualties, yet currently still running. Or how, in light of his presumptions that some concepts are too weird to do anything but flop, how Roseby would explain the success of Book of Mormon, or Mamma Mia for that matter.

BBC Radio 4 Extra is winding down its crash course on Terrence Rattigan. After airing radio renditions of some of his best-known plays, the online channel is airing a multi-part documentary about him. (Technically, it’s recitations from Michael Darlow’s biography Terrence Rattigan—The Man and His Work, but Clive Merrison’s lively reading style and amusing impersonations of Laurence Olivier and others makes it sound very documentarary.) A more concise doc aired a few weeks ago.

This is the Rattigan centenary, and it’s striking that it’s also the Tennessee Williams centenary, because where Williams was progressive and divided and helped foster Off Broadway and experimental workshops, Rattigan was fussily traditional, publicly calling out new writers like Beckett for not deigning to make their plays more middlebrow and popular. Rattigan died in 1977, so he lived not only to see the West End embrace the absurdists but the upholsterers such as Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Pity was, Terrence Rattigan fell out of fashion but he really wasn’t all that uncool. He’d done the screenplay for Graham Greene’s scruffy novel Brighton Rock, a movie that inspired lots of angry young men and punks. His play Deep Blue Sea was bracing in 1952 for its discussions of suicide, female empowerment, spousal abuse and homosexuality. The BBC bio ends with the popular reassessment of The Browning Version scaled down for scruffy small theaters.

Since my father was British, I always had an awareness of Rattigan as a prolific, popular playwright and not just (as most Americans think of him) the guy who wrote The Browning Version. My father used to let me stay up to see The VIPs when that 1963 aired on TV. Hardly considered one of his classics, but the cast that gathered to do it demonstrates what a Rattigan script was worth: Richard Burton& Elizabeth Taylor (right after Cleopatra), Louis Jourdan, Elsa Martinelli, Maggie Smith, Rod Taylor, Orson Welles, Michael Hordern, Stringer Davis, Clifton Jones, David Frost, Richard Briers… You wouldn’t see a cast like that until the disaster film craze of a decade later.

Rattigan’s output was remarkable, even for its theater-saturated time: 27 stage plays (which yielded at least a dozen films), six original screenplays, six screen adapations of works by others, half a dozen plays for TV and lots for radio.

The current consensus is that Rattigan was a fine playwright who sold himself short. Writing with a natural wit and a conversational prose style, he could have blazed new trails in dramatic storytelling but chose instead to simply excel at crowdpleasing melodrama.

The quality of his work isn’t usually questioned—I’d say his average plays are in the same range as what are considered Neil Simon’s best plays (The “BB” ones), with a similar mix of mirth and pathos. His best plays are real twisty turny emotional wrangles, with ripe subplots.

Ripe for revival, especially at East Coast regional theaters, I’d wager, where suburban audiences primed by Simon Gray, Lucinda Coxon and others will be psyched to find a mid-20th century writer of style, substance and tradition.

The show ran on three different radio networks (primarily CBS) for 20 years, and DeMille hosted it for nine. You can hear it broadcast on a number of different internet-based Old Time Radio channels, including the fine one hosted by Antioch http://radio.macinmind.com/ and can download episodes from archive.org, http://www.archive.org/details/Lux17
iTunes, audible.com and elsewhere.

I think historians often underestimate how important a widely disseminated public image can be for a biographical subject whose talents ostensibly lay behind the scenes. The fact that Hitchcock had his own TV series, that John Huston was an actor, and that Cecil B. DeMille had Lux Radio Theater unquestionably had lots to do with them being the best-known and most-written-about directors of their respective times.

Scott Eyman, then, is remiss is doing so little reporting on DeMille’s Lux period. He does give over about seven of Empire of Dream’s 580 pages to the radio program, but nearly all of that concerns a political battle DeMille waged when the American Federation of Radio Artists proposed assessing a dollar fee from all its members to fight a state measure which would open the radio industry to non-union workers. It’s a fascinating tale in itself, one which finds the DeMille admirably sticking to his personal principles, refusing to pay, then ultimately sacrificing his cushy radio gig as a result.

But that story is well chronicled in DeMille’s own memoirs. I really want to know more about Lux Radio Theatre itself—how it was cast, how much time it took to produce. It’s clear that the hands-on DeMille didn’t just show up to read the intro scripts; his wind-up banter with the stars following the dramas seems both loose and authoritative. I remain curious about how seriously he took this decade-long gig, and how much a hand he had in it. Lux Radio Theatre is as crucial an archive of theater in its time as those golden age TV productions which ended up in the Broadway Theatre Archive box set, or the PBS series American Playhouse were in theirs.

HOW I’LL SPEND MY SUMMER VACATION: ALICE COOPER, THE VERY PERSONIFICATION OF SCHOOL BEING OUT, IS COMING TO FOXWOODS CASINO.

Hey, I just spent an hour yammering live on the Colin McEnroe show on WNPR. I guess they post podcasts of past episodes here.

The topic was “Summer Arts Preview,” and the other guests were Frank Rizzo of the Hartford Courant and Maurice Robertson of the Hartford Jazz Festival (July 15-17 this year), poet Tony Hoagland (who’s reading at the Sunken Garden Poetry Series June 8) and, in a whimsical ‘phone interview, Terry Adams, who’s bringing his new line-up of NRBQ to the Clang Thang weekend at the Best Western Colonial Inn in East Windsor June 24-26. I was the token Southern Connecticut correspondent.

Eveyone had an Arts & Ideas fave to plug: mine was Bang on a Can All-Stars. But I also got to hype the O’Neill Center’s Puppetry Conference (June 11-19), the Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival (June 23-Aug. 12), Alice Cooper at Foxwoods (Aug. 13) and The Wiggles at the Oakdale (June 19). Totally missed a chance to get in a word about the Ideat Village festival or the New Haven/Leon Sister City Theater Project, but whoosh!—how these radio things fly by.