The Scrooge Identity
Drama of the Week
BBC
3.7 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 7 April 2026
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Hamburg, 1992. A pipe-bomb goes off in a department store at one in the morning, and a ransom note arrives shortly after, demanding a million marks and signed "Uncle Scrooge". The police are baffled. The press are delighted. And a nation starts rooting for the wrong side.
A cat-and-mouse thriller based on an extraordinary true story, about a lone eccentric who seems to be running his criminal campaign straight from the pages of a Donald Duck comic book, and the police team who realise the only way to catch him is to make him feel understood.
Warm, witty and surprisingly tender, it might just be unlike any true-crime story you've heard before. Based on real events with imagined scenes.
Narrator . . . . . Clare Corbett Funke . . . . . Blake Harrison Daleki . . . . . Ben Crowe Brockmann . . . . . Amaka Okafor Springborn . . . . . John Macmillan Blashke . . . . . Sam Swann Weber . . . . . Sam Dale
Writer: Simon Scardifield
Sound design: Sharon Hughes Technical producers: Keith Graham & Jenni Burnett Casting Manager: Alex Curran Production co-ordinator: Luke MacGregor Director: Sasha Yevtushenko
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | An abandoned psychiatric hospital. |
| 0:10.7 | As if staff had simply walked out one day and never returned. |
| 0:14.3 | And the unexplained death of a nursing assistant. |
| 0:17.8 | Mary Glasgow 35 had died when on Judy. |
| 0:20.8 | It wasn't just an altercation. The room was wrecked. |
| 0:23.2 | The curtains were on the floor. |
| 0:24.9 | She didn't just die at her workplace. |
| 0:27.0 | Something strange happened. |
| 0:29.9 | Assume nothing. |
| 0:31.1 | What happened to Mary Glasgow? |
| 0:33.5 | Listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.1 | This is Drama of the Week. |
| 0:43.8 | All the crazy stuff that happened, that was never the plan. |
| 0:48.7 | What I wanted was to be a cartoonist. |
| 0:51.5 | That was all I ever wanted, really. |
| 0:58.6 | But is that a real job? I could never make it into one. Not back then. A Hamburg department store, June 13th, 1992. |
| 1:11.6 | The homeware section. |
| 1:13.6 | Shells full of plates, vases, figurines, |
| 1:16.6 | decorative items for the mantelpiece. |
| 1:18.6 | An amusing cruet in the shape of a pair of cats. |
| 1:22.6 | If it sounds quiet, that's because it is one o'clock in the morning. |
... |
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