1. Gargantua

Francois Rabelais’ bawdy, exuberant adventures of medieval giants. A dizzying blend of fantasy, comedy, philosophy and scatological humour. The world's a messy place.

Gargantua depicts a young giant, reduced to laughable insanity by an education at the hands of paternal ignorance, old crones and syphilitic professors, who is rescued and turned into a cultured Christian knight.

This tale is a dizzying blend of fantasy, comedy, philosophy and scatological humour. The world's a messy place. All the big mock-heroic novels that followed - Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Gulliver's Travels, Ulysses - are about mess, they're about slops and slime, encyclopaedic in their efforts to encompass humanity in all its bawdy, chaotic, grungy, and painful reality. And like Gargantua and Pantagruel they're also very funny. The Rabelaisian world view is founded on the assumption that the humourless are not yet wise - and these tales insist you learn to laugh at humanity.

Dramatised by Lavinia Murray.

Rabelais …. David Troughton
Gargantua .... Robert Wilfort
Grangousier …. Eric Potts
Gargamelle …. Melissa Jane Sinden
Holofornes/Friar Jean …. Jonathan Keeble
Panochrates .... Malcolm Raeburn
Eudomon/Sun …. Kathryn Hunt

Director: Gary Brown

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2011.