Whatever Happened to Gertrude Page?

Whatever Happened to Gertrude Page?

A 1-hour radio documentary for LMFM Radio

Funded by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland with the Television Licence Fee

Whatever Happened to Gertrude Page?, a new radio documentary by Chris Nikkel for Little Road Productions Ltd., will broadcast at 12noon on Monday October 31st 2022 on LMFM Radio.

Gertrude Page has been called the Maeve Binchy of her day. She’s also been called, ‘the Kipling of Rhodesia’, the country she lived out the last two decades of her life. Her 20 books sold 2.5 million copies worldwide, making her a household name in Britain and Ireland, and as far away as New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. Her most famous novel, Paddy the Next Best Thing, set in her favourite village of Omeath, in Co Louth, sold more than 300,000 copies.

So popular was Gertrude Page, that when she died in 1922, the play-adaptation of Paddy the Next Best Thing was on a record-breaking run at the Savoy, in London—the following year the Irish story hit the silver screen as a British-made silent film, and then was subsequently remade as a Hollywood blockbuster starting Janet Graynor and heartthrob Warner Baxter. Few writers could top the success of Gertrude Page in the early 20th Century. The question is: Whatever happened to Gertrude Page?

Whatever happened to Gertrude Page? is the story of one writer who scaled the heights of fame and fortune, only to have her legacy dismantled just as quickly because the inevitable shifts in historical and political perspectives. It is a cautionary tale, but also an illustration of a how easily history moves on from the convictions and beliefs of the past.

The documentary was funded by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland with the Television Licence Fee.

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