Les Miserables – For Once, Not the Musical

Radio 4 Extra* has just recently finished a run of their epic radio play of Les Miserables, and as I've been very busy at work lately I actually managed to listen to the whole thing.  It's the closest I've yet come to reading the book (shame, I know) and it was very exciting, particularly the part where I got introduced to a character who is entirely glossed over in the musical, to everyone's loss.

First, the usual suspects, Marius and Eponine:


            

. . and then my new favourite, Combeferre! Completely aside from his being just a really great character (and played by one of my favourite radio actors, no less) what I especially love about Combeferre is the fact that, on the most important day of his life, he has a cold. How brilliantly mundane! No one ever thinks of that, but it makes him and his experience so much more real. He spends a good deal of time rhapsodizing on tomatoes and how it is impossible to find good ones in Paris, which led to this variant on the drawing. 

*which I will think of as BBC7 until I die