Fiery the Angels Fell - David Thomson - a podcast by BBC Radio 3

Los Angeles, November 2019. Blade Runner's future is now ours. Ridley Scott's 1982 classic future film of replicants escaping to a retrofitted Earth and meeting their end at the hands of the washed out, titular Blade Runner, Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, is adapted from Philip K. Dick's equally classic 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Both film and book are meditations on what it is to be human but we have been looking through the eyes of the film ever since it plunged us into its acid-rain, neon-coated, west-coast nightmare of flaming night skies, commercial ziggurats, flying cars and fake animals. Now its future is our present. We live in a world of mass species die off, environmental crisis, rapidly developing A.I., all powerful corporations and extreme divides between rich and poor.

Film and book have bled into our culture in many different ways and in this series of the Essay, we mark the year of Blade Runner, in the month of Blade Runner. The legendary writer on film, David Thomson, takes a long hard look back at Ridley Scott's rain-soaked mash-up of existential noir and artificial souls.

"Maybe you’ve never seen Blade Runner – but you think you have. It’s one of those films in our dreams and feeble memory. I used to think it was what it claimed to be, the story of a sour bounty hunter charged to eliminate or retire some dangerous escapees from the old scheme of how the universe was run."

Producer: Mark Burman

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