The Wind in the Willows: A Weasel’s Tale

Drama of the Week

BBC

Drama, Fiction

3.9 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A new re-imagining of The Wind in the Willows told from the margins. Set in a timeless, Kenneth Grahame-inspired England, the drama looks up from weasel-height at class, home and who gets to belong when the Wild Wood is being carved up by developers. Narrated by Penelope Wilton, it blends the familiar riverbank world with the pressures of eviction, empty grand houses and power concentrated in a few determined hands.

Kit, a young weasel, is watching her family slide into precarity as the scrubland around their burrow is sold off and the criminal Chief Weasel tightens his grip. With her best friends - Portly the otter and Radar the bat - Kit’s world collides with Mole, Ratty, Badger and other classic characters, while a grand house standing empty becomes a magnet for grievance and opportunity. What follows is a fight not for glory but for a place to live: shifting alliances, contested territory and small acts of care that build a community where suspicion says it cannot exist. A story about who gets to stay, what makes a home, and how belonging is made on the riverbank.

Dramatist Tom Morton-Smith is a playwright and screenwriter best known for the RSC’s Oppenheimer and the multi-award-winning stage adaptation of My Neighbour Totoro.

Cast:

Narrator . . . . . Penelope Wilton Kit . . . . . Claire Morgan Portly . . . . . Harriet Carmichael Radar . . . . . Kathryn Drysdale Magpie, Chief, Ratty, Badger, Toad . . . . . Ed Gaughan Ma-Weasel . . . . . Jasmine Hyde Mole . . . . . Django Bevan Otter . . . . . Clive Hayward

Written by Tom Morton-Smith

Production co-ordinator: Luke MacGregor Casting Manager: Alex Curran Technical producers: Keith Graham, Sam Dickinson Sound designer: Sharon Hughes Director: Sasha Yevtushenko

A BBC Studios production

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts.
0:06.5	The party is raging.
0:09.8	Drinks flowing, laughter echoing.
0:12.8	But this isn't your standard night out.
0:17.0	It's all happening inside prison.
0:20.2	Join me, Amber Hack, for a shocking case of forbidden love,
0:25.0	hidden corruption and a million pound drug boss.
0:28.7	You don't think it can happen to you, but it does.
0:31.0	Gangster presents sex, drugs and cell block parties.
0:35.7	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:50.9	Spring had come at last to the wild wood.
0:55.0	The forest floor was a dappled carpet of bluebells.
0:59.0	The hedgehogs and the dormice were beginning to stir.
1:03.0	And Kit, a young weasel, was taking her first steps out into the world.
1:08.0	Weasels are solitary animals,
1:14.4	but this was a lesson that Kit had not yet learned.
1:16.5	Morning, Mr. Weapecker.
1:18.3	Oh my.
1:23.5	A weasel is a thief.
1:25.9	This is something everybody knows.
1:29.3	They do not have the tools to burrow or build. They're squatters and vagabonds.
1:32.3	Their house, in the roots of a tall silver birch tree,
	...

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