After attending to the first quarter-hour of Stephen Wakelam’s dramatisation of A Severed Head (24-28 August), my wife complained, “What a dreadful lot of people”. The point was uncontestable – they are a dreadful lot of people – and yet so is the context in which this “orgy of partner-swapping”, as the Radio 4 announcer gamely put it, is framed. Critical orthodoxy always suggests that this 1960s Iris Murdoch novel is a skit on the once-fashionable phil-osophy of existentialism, an extended joke about the consequences of unfettered free will when applied to personal relationships.There had been plenty more personal relationships on display in Dream Girl (22 August), written by Robin Brooks and advertised as “a hallucinogenic trip through the