Podcasts, and other news

Coming soon -

Interviews with Nigel Deacon and Roger Bickerton.


Also, an interesting development - the BBC is now interacting with itunes, and their Play of the Week is the #1 itunes podcast. Which is wonderful. I like how people can leave comments and ratings for it, but notice in the specific entry how:

1. It's still on Apple's home turf, and the BBC is not in control of the context within which the podcast entry exists. That is to say, the web stuff surrounding the description and comments, etc. itunes is neither easy to use nor egalitarian in terms of accessibility. Try running the program on an old PC, and watch your RAM wither away.
2. The entry lacks fundamental context indicators - such as cast list, director, and some indication of the type of story being told. This information should be available on the entry itself, because it helps people to classify and understand what the thing in fact is. And therefore, makes it more memorable and accessible for future interactions with the play, such as discussions among friends. The entry should also have a non-literal but specific graphic accompanying the play.
   
3. The social interaction you see with the comments and ratings do not contribute to building an overall community or knowledge about the medium, because these ratings and comments, while useful in deciding whether or not to download this podcast, do not place their opinions in relation to other radio drama. Just other podcasts.
   
4. The audience for audio drama content is vast indeed. Check out the number one for the US - it's This American Life, a nonfiction series. And yet, it is also probably the best source of narrative on US radio today, along with #5, The Moth. Listeners in the States are clearly hungry for narrative content, and I suspect they wouldn't mind if it was fiction instead of non-fiction.
   

Scripts of Lost History

As you may know, many of the radio plays broadcast by the BBC over the last century have not been archived, and therefore probably no longer exist. That is to say, recordings of them no longer exist. There are only two ways to experience such lost plays. One could fly into outer space and attempt to collect the ancient transmissions that emanated from Earth at the time of the original broadcasts. These radio waves continue forward in the darkness, many light years away. Their destination is yet unknown.

Or, we could read the scripts.

Or could we?

Radio plays are primarily constructions of words. Like a stage play, reading a radio script, although not quite as grand as listening to the audio, is enough to convey meaning and intention, and contains enough artistic information as to be a fun and rewarding experience. People read plays all the time. If you lived in Los Angeles, as I did, people even read screenplays. All three formats share the same ancestry of dramatic literature (my argument for screenplays as dramatic lit. will make an appearance soon). So, if we do not have access to the original radio broadcasts, why not read the scripts and enrich ourselves?

Most radio scripts never get published. If you are a famous stage playwright, you might be excepted. Pinter, Stoppard, Beckett, Arden, and David Pownall are all big names in theatre, and their work for radio is of interest to scholars of the stage. If you are a radio dramatist who won a Giles Cooper Award, you got your script published. But the Giles Cooper Awards are now defunct.

The importance of reading scripts cannot be understated – especially for those who want to write them. The most profound lessons I learned about screenwriting came not during class, but while reading a stack of screenplays. In that spirit, I spent the last two years reading every single Giles Cooper Award volume, and it was extremely useful. But it's not enough.

I wonder what happens to all the scripts that the BBC has produced over the years. They must be somewhere. Perhaps languishing in a vault where they will never see the light of day? Or turning to mould in the writer's attic?

Aspiring screenwriters have many resources for researching their craft, and many websites offer free screenplays, including different versions of classic films. Audio drama has none of these things, and yet still continues to produce incredible drama. What more could be done if this hidden world were more accessible? The potential for new dialog with older work, and for spurts of inspiration and creativity emanating from this conceptual trove is staggering.

But it is only a concept, and I have no answers for these questions. I don't know where these lost scripts live. And if they yet exist, no doubt legal issues would prevent them from becoming accessible in the way that screenplay pdfs are freely traded now.

In the meantime, I can contribute a small amount to this idea: the script for Robert Ferguson's Transfigured Night, a powerful, poetic play for radio. I do not have a copy of the broadcast, but I was able to scan it into a pdf.

Transfigured Night has been analyzed brilliantly by Elissa Guralnick in Sight Unseen, so if you are reading that book, click on the link below, and you'll be able to follow her analysis much more closely.

The script for Transfigured Night by Robert Ferguson – Download Here.

Interview with John Fletcher

John Fletcher, interviewed by Modern Soundling

John Fletcher is an award-winning playwright who has written extensively for radio. His work includes Death and the Tango, The Great Chocolate Murders, Baghdad Burning, and The Sicilian Expedition, among many others. I'm very pleased that he was kind enough to agree to be interviewed for this blog. Many thanks!

Modern Soundling: How did you first become involved in writing for radio?

John Fletcher: A French girlfriend of a friend of mine read a verse play of mine and said you should try this with radio. I sent it to the BBC and they liked it - though it wasn't suitable for radio - and this encouraged me to write a full script on spec - Wandering In Eden - which was accepted. For the first time a seemingly large sum of money fell into my hands. Love at first sight!

MS: Many writers say they like writing for radio because of the lack of restrictions. But radio plays are perhaps less visible (or less lucrative) than film or television – is there a trade-off?

JF: Dead right. Radio is a wonderful medium to write for. A sort of cinema for words. (And, as they say, radio has the BEST pictures). But the money is awful. I was told sternly in a very headmasterly way by the then Head of Scripts Richard Imison that I would never make a living out of radio. (Though I did raise a family on it - a feat which included often long periods of farm labouring, teaching, driving white vans, hedge laying, grave digging and working in butchers shops - even quite recently).

So I also wrote a fair amount for TV and theatre. (And theatre is the key in Britain to getting anywhere. It is, foolishly and mistakenly, the most prestigious of the dramatic forms, though virtually no one goes to it). And I have tried on several occasions to get into films - which I feel to be, with radio, my natural form. (Films and film making have many close parallels with the making of radio plays). But without success. So radio its been.

(And audio drama these days, with the internet, torrents and i-pods, seems to be potentially an increasingly influential and enjoyed medium.)

MS: Of your many plays, are there any particular ones that you are especially proud of?

JF: I don't really have favourites. Stuff I've written in the past I very rarely or never re-listen to and I tend to be concentrated on the project I'm doing. So trying to remember the plots of past plays for Audio Wiki has been quite good fun (if probably pretty inaccurate). I do have recordings of almost all my plays and I suppose I should be sending those he hasn't already got to Nigel Deacon so he can re-record them.

I think "Russia" is probably my favourite - though the second best sequence had to be dropped for reasons of time. The opening goes on a bit, but I dwell so much on the Edwardian anarcho-syndicalist trade unions and strikes because anarcho-syndicalism is my favourite form of political organization - before marxist-leninism and fascism screwed up working class movements probably for ever. Phil Davies does a staggering performance as The Sergeant.

I like my two domestic dramas "Suddenly" and "The Glory of the Lord." Reflecting on "The Glory" now I can see that the two male leads, played by Steve Hodson and Christian Rodska, prefigure the characters the same actors play in "Death and the Tango." Steve Hodson plays the down-to-earth mystic, Christian Rodska the self-destructive romantic. But while Tango resolves itself through comedy, "The Glory" is definitely going in the direction of tragedy.

I'm also very fond of "Death and the Tango" - the sustained fantasy and some of the humour - though I think the second half in heaven goes on a bit too much. (There are several different versions, all with different timings). Incidentally, it took me 7 years to persuade the Beeb to do it, and if Nigel Bryant hadn't come along (we'd already worked together in theatre) it would probably never have been done.

The third part of my "Democracy and Language" trilogy is also good, especially the Russian woman storyline. "D&L" is essentially the story of the rise and fall of civilization. In Athens just after the defeat of the Persians, ideas and concepts such as democracy were being invented so fast that language had to be consciously invented just so that people could conceive of what was happening. That is the first leg of the trilogy, narrated by Aeschylus. The second part is about the formation of the Churchill coalition in 1940 and its first few highly unsteady months. All Churchill had was words. The power in government was still with the appeasers and we hardly had any weapons for our defense, so for a while Churchill's language was the only thing that held it together. Originally only these two dramas were in the proposal, and I wanted to do three 90 minute plays on both. This was rejected. (The Churchill play, especially, was so seriously shortened, it ended up as a too flippant piece).

I reduced them to two single plays, then added a third, divided equally between contemporary Russia and the US. They are about the death of democracy through the loss of language. The American strand is based on historical events, set in the US maximum security prison in Wyoming where Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, Ramzi Yousef (the al Qaeda member who tried to blow up the WTC in the early 90's), and America's Number One gangster (a Mexican) whose name now escapes me were all imprisoned. In the prison exercise yard McVeigh and Yousef first found they had a common interest in old films, then all four of them started a political debating club. But being locked up, their words can lead nowhere. Meanwhile, in the Russian strand, the woman, searching for the bones of her son lost in the Chechen War (also based on a true story), leads the return to the sort of matriarchal society Aeschylus originally escaped from.

The play was all about the issues thrown up by 9/11. It was written before 9/11, recorded before it, but was scheduled to be broadcast a couple of months after it. The BBC panicked as it involved members of al Qaeda, even though it wasn't about terrorism. The trilogy was broadcast on Radio 3 very late at night with minimal publicity and nothing has been heard of it since.

My writing has changed since 9/11. I have become much more political as, from my perspective, I see the world becoming less and less stable. I wrote "Ebola Attack" simply because it is such a powerful true story that deserves a wider audience. I am also very proud to have finally - it took almost four years to persuade the BBC - gotten Riverbend's "Baghdad Burning" blog on the air. Riverbend is a magnificent writer. Let's hope she survives. I have tried to get other Iraq and Middle Eastern stuff on the air - including a 90 minuter on burial rituals in the Shia holy city of Najaf - but after the Hutton Enquiry, the BBC is very timid about doing anything in the least bit controversial or challenging.

I do sense I'm now wandering out of my strictly political stance, and am getting more imaginative again.

MS: Sometimes, producers/directors develop close associations with particular writers. Are there any producers/directors that you have had a particularly fruitful collaboration with, or that have been especially attuned to realizing your artistic intentions?

JF: Shaun MacLoughlin was the guy who really set me up as a writer and got my stuff commissioned. He was (and is) the most selfless of gentlemen, and probably did not rein me in as much as I should have been. He was very generous when recording and allowed me to talk a lot with the actors, and was always open to my views when I thought he had got the interpretation wrong. He once had to leave the studio for a morning in an emergency, and I suddenly found myself - for the only time in my life - directing a play. After a while I concluded I was doing all right as the PA had started knitting and was reading the Daily Mail.

Nigel Bryant and I used each other to develop our ideas on radio drama and its techniques in quite novel ways. It was a pity he left the Beeb as he had a real understanding and passion for drama.

Foz Allan was wonderful but left after only two plays to ascend to the giddy heights of producing "Casualty." If you're out there, mate, and happen to be looking for a job and read this, come back to radio.

Marc Beeby, my present producer, is superb.

MS: What are your feelings about the future of radio drama?

JF: Both negative and positive. Negatively, the Beeb has been so badly managed since Birt - and has been so poor in its moves against private monopolists like Murdoch and privatising politicians like Thatcher and Blair and now Jeremy Hunt - that amongst the people who actually produce programmes, as opposed to the vast corporate class which has moved into and expanded top management positions in the last 20 years (and I'm talking about a class far higher than anyone involved in audio drama), there is less and less money to spend on programmes. 90 minute plays - in my view the perfect dramatic length to write for - disappeared from Radio 4 original play schedules ten years ago at least.

Plays that are being commissioned after the latest round of cuts are getting shorter and shorter and having to be written for smaller and smaller casts. Monologues are all the rage! I don't mind writing monologues - and have written quite a few - but when you want to deal with profound and complex issues, when you really want to take an audience off for a ride through the unknown and knock their socks off - they're not the first format I'd think of. (Though Homer did achieve a fair amount in Monologue Format!)

So the future of Beeb drama output doesn't look too rosy on the surface.

But its fairly obvious we live in very interesting, very challenging, swiftly changing times. Huge amounts of money are not lying around as they once were. Compared with film or TV or theatre, audio's costs are very, very cheap, even for long, well-populated dramas. And people are becoming pissed off with Hollywood teenage blockbusters and the inanity of multi channel TV. As people get less and less money and monopolists like Murdoch suck up more and more high quality films and sport behind high paywalls, alternatives are going to be sought by the public. I-Pods and the Web provide great new platforms and distribution systems. (I hope my jargon's right here!)

A more accessible system of accessing past radio dramas is required. (I find Torrent quite arcane and difficult to operate). Perhaps an audio version of You-Tube. But that still ignores how you fund new drama. A system like Kindle? The BBC seems to be experimenting with this, charging for downloads, but to subsidize the more arcane stuff you need some genuine popular drama. Perhaps like Home Box Office.

But with people spending less and less time in front of the telly, unable to afford to go out to film/theatre, and all eared with I-Pods, there does seem to be an opening in the market.

P.S. - Beeb audio drama has apparently just signed a deal with I-Tunes. (I personally hate I-Tunes. I can't do anything audio on my Mac without being crushed by it).

MS: As an award-winning professional, are there works by others that you admire or have found inspiration from?

JF: I get most inspiration from film - especially Catholic directors like Ford, Bunuel, Hitchcock, Lang, Kevin Smith. My main radio inspiration came from comedy like Hancock, Spike Milligan and the Goons, the Glums - not so much from the drama. I admired Marc Beeby's recent black comedy on Shirley Porter, "Shirley Mander" by Gregory Evans, greatly. Tracy-Ann Oberman was stunning.

MS: Your work has included a variety of different types of stories and genres. Is there any particular story or type of story that you have not yet had the opportunity to write?

JF: I've always wanted to do Screwball. I really admire those American film writers of the 30's - usually WASP Ivy League/Jewish combos - who wrote them. (As someone fascinated by the rise and fall of language, I've always been gobsmacked by that period in the early C20th when Jewish immigrants into America fell in love with English). I wanted to do "The Awful Truth" (my favourite, Irene Dunne is transcendent in it and Cary Grant first becomes Cary Grant), "Bringing Up Baby", and "The Philadelphia Story", but unfortunately most of the rights had been bought up by what are called Broadway "scrapyard" agents.

I've always wanted to do Busby Berkeley musicals on radio as I love them and Rogers and Astaire stuff, but had to make do with co-writing Bollywood's first radio musical, "What am I to you." (Not my greatest success). I also tried to adapt John Ford's silent classic "The Iron Horse" - silent film, radio play (geddit?) - but we couldn't locate the rights. I'd also love to do James Ellroy's "The Big Nowhere" - its his best I think - but I was pushing for it when he wasn't famous and the Beeb went for his inferior later stuff when they finally went. Due to the disastrous decisions of its top executives in recent years, the Beeb can no longer afford to buy the rights.

I also like doing "artistic archaeology" - like the Beatles "Up Against It" - working up scripts that were never made at the time. There was a similar project I worked on with Pete Townshend - who I've known since the 60's - which was recreating the musical he planned in 1971 which involved the music he released on The Who's "Who's Next" LP. Unfortunately - (just think, getting your hands on those classics - like a barn full of vintage Rolls Royces!) - it didn't work out and someone else finally wrote the script for the radio play. (It was called "Light House.")

I've had longterm plans to do Xenophon's "The Persian Expedition", but no success, and strangely enough - I know you're a Tolkien fan - I've always wanted to do a play on the Inklings meetings in the 30's in the Oxford pub "The Eagle and Child" - where Tolkien and CS Lewis and Charles Williams (my favourite, and the guy who greatly inspired modern steam punkists like Tim Powers). I find it wonderful that the three of them, without power, in a remote backroom in a pub - met to do their best to overthrow the modernist, materialist world - and ended up, judging by their book and film sales, doing really well. I've also dreamed of doing Waugh's "Vile Bodies" for years.

I've got various ideas I've spent a lot of time working on for a long time - in various genres - but it would be best not to reveal them at the moment as I'm still trying to flog them.

MS: ''Death and the Tango'', aside from being a highly acclaimed radio play, is also one of my favorites. How did this unique story come about?

JF: From memory, I had a dream about the first half, the dark half, the ocean liner and the tango. I got the idea of the tango dancing on electric contacts from a BBC TV play (very good) about working class Brummies obsessively dancing the tango with half egg shells glued to their heels. (I might also have been subconciously influenced by Mark Twain's short story "The Great Dark" - but I might have remembered that wrong and read it after I had the dream). I then tried to sell it. It took seven years, during which at some time the other half added itself. I sometimes think the second half is a bit self-concious/artificial - light vs darkness etc, devil has the best tunes etc - but I like and am quite proud of the musical ending. (Fred Astaire in "Mr Bojangles.")

Two of my great passions are united in the play. The Tango which I love. I haunt the Buenos Aires Club videos on You-tube. And even more, Renaissance neo-platonism - it was great being able to quote great chunks of Ficino and Pico de la Mirandola. (I think there's other people quoted but I can't remember who they are). I've been a "neo-platonist" - well, I've loved it - since a school teacher explained it to me in an English lesson on "Much Ado" at the age of 16.The most influential book I've ever read was Frances Yates "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition."

MS: What's next for you, and is there anything we should look forward to in the near future you would like to mention?

JF: I'm currently on the second draft of a Woman's Hour Serial (5 X 15 minutes) adaptation of May Witwit and Bee Rowlatt's "Talking of Jane Austen in Baghdad's" book about May Witwit's attempts, as a Professor of English Literature, to teach her students the novels of Jane Austen in the middle of their ferocious and bloody civil war. I'm also adapting Nicholas Monsarrat's "The Cruel Sea" for a two part Classic Serial. It is his monumental and on occasions very powerful history of the Battle of the North Atlantic as seen through the eyes of the naval crews that actually fought it.

What excites me most though is a Radio 3 90-minuter, probably entitled "Sea Change", about the battle between appeasers and anti-appeasers in the lead-up to World War II. I'm not interested in doing the Churchill story - which has been done again and again - but it is about the much more junior individuals and ordinary people, how they finally sorted out all their conflicting emotions and petty quarrels and different politics and united to fight Germany. (How societies come together and fall apart has been part of my recent obsession - through Democracy and Language, The Sicilian Expedition and Tamburlaine to this). I see many parallels between Chamberlain and Blair - individuals who knew very little about foreign policy being swept up by simplistic, seemingly idealistic notions and wreaking havoc. It is also about how new coalitions form out of the wreckage of the old (parallels with Britain's present coalition government). I'm not really interested in what is right or wrong, I'm interested in how order can arise almost spontaneously out seemingly chaotic conditions. How the powerful finally crumble through hubris and how the weak endure their endless defeats and humiliations to suddenly cohere into government.

Interviews Coming Soon, plus more on Mortimer

Since one of my previous posts made its way to Twitter, I suddenly realized that some actual person might read this blog. So I shall state unequivocally: I do not believe that Jeremy Mortimer is an evil wizard. But you never know.

Hyperbole aside, my point is that radio drama is a fully fledged medium without corresponding fully-fledged institutions. Although my degree is in film, I minored in sociology. One of the concepts I learned (from Durkheim, har har) is the idea that society is like a vast organism, with each part fulfilling a function to create stability in perpetuity. Even the rocky unpleasant bits. If you apply this idea to cultural products, you might notice how different institutions work together to perpetuate the art forms that they focus on. Doctor Who is my favorite example, and one that I will continue to use compulsively. There are content producers, critics, fans, factual literature, conventions, local organizations, websites, and highly specialized nooks and crannies for a fan of the program to delve into. Together, they make for a healthy community of listeners and producers.

The argument, in the end, is this - any content producer (the BBC being the major player in this case) can and should pay attention to the ancillary social and cultural institutions that correspond to their content. Doctor Who's institutions arose organically, but with key support from the BBC at crucial times. Radio drama needs that type of support now. The reason it needs it now is because, as content delivery changes and digitizes, we stand poised either on an audio drama renaissance, or an audio drama disintegration. The cost of making it a renaissance is almost nothing.

But what I really want to announce is this:

Exclusive interview with acclaimed playwright John Fletcher!
Coming Soon.

One Thousand

A quick update - the Audio Drama Wiki just hit 1,000 entries. Not bad for three months of work.

The one-thousandth entry was Orphans in Waiting by Wally K. Daly.

The Mystery of Jeremy Mortimer

Jeremy Mortimer – award-winning BBC radio drama producer . Enigma. Who is this man? What does he look like? Where is he right now?

These are all questions I'm sure you are dying to know. And yet, they remain unanswerable. As far as I can tell, the BBC doesn't have a publicity shot, an official bio, or roster of his work. He appears nowhere, flitting about in rumor and shadow, allegedly producing such masterpieces as Andrew Rissik's Troy Trilogy, or the Mike Walker adaptation of Dickens' Our Mutual Friend. But the question remains...does he really exist?

And if he does exist, why is the BBC so afraid of him?

The last question is the most important. Indeed, it's actually my point. I'm sure Jeremy Mortimer is a perfectly normal person who's rather busy going about his job (and doing it terrifically well). But although he's an important figure in the world of radio drama, he barely has an online presence, aside from a lone Twitter feed.

For some comparison, let's look at my other great obsession, Doctor Who. Even as far back as the 1980's, the Doctor Who producers were not just responsible for producing the series, but also for promoting it. John Nathan-Turner would fly into Chicago dressed in eye-destroying Hawaiian shirts for fan conventions, making dramatic announcements and spearheading rabble-rousing campaigns. Russell T Davies would be interviewed all over the place with his exuberant Welsh intonations, drumming up enthusiasm and buzz about his series. Even the current Who producer, the more reticent Steven Moffat, with his sharp, Scottish wit, is a major presence in the media world. Not only do I know what he looks like, I've met the guy. I drank a beer a few feet away from him at a crowded sports bar in Los Angeles. He always wears the same black blazer.

Although Doctor Who has a somewhat higher cultural profile than radio drama, the point remains – the people who produce content have an important role to play in promoting that content. The audience wants to hear more about the things they like and the decisions that happen behind the scenes. The people who create content become characters in an unfolding real-life drama. Take Peter Jackson, for example.

If you sat through all three Lord of the Rings films and watched all the documentaries that accompanied the DVDs (I watched every single minute), by the end of the saga Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor became characters of their own, you came to like them and hope they would succeed. There's even a tearful moment of triumph when, after all the work and struggle for the past decade, they finally prevail not only in finishing the final film, but in breaking records at the box office and the Oscars. That last documentary was almost as emotional as Return of the King. Maybe even more-so, because it was real.

Radio drama is not an epic fantasy film. But it has dedicated fans, and could have an even larger audience if there was a healthier tapestry of culture surrounding the plays and series. The BBC does not reward its radio audience the way it rewards its Doctor Who audience. It doesn't have to do much. At the minimal level I'm talking about putting faces to names, web design, biographical pages, publicity stills, and cross-promoting its work in non-fiction venues. Maybe they do some of that, I have no idea if Jeremy Mortimer appears on a morning news programs. Maybe he does. But giving the audience characters in the non-fiction cultural narrative is an easy thing to do, and it gives the audience something extra to care about and appreciate. It also is good for morale and for soliciting feedback and creating a dialog with the public.

Maybe Jeremy Mortimer is too busy. Ok, that's fair. Maybe somebody else would be a better spokesperson. Or maybe somebody in the publicity department could do their job and generate some buzz without him having to do anything except smile for a camera. What if he has “a face for radio”? Maybe he looks like a crazy evil person. Well, that's great. That's interesting. You know who else looks like an evil wizard? Christopher Lee, one of the most popular and prolific actors of all time. In any case, the Mystery of Jeremy Mortimer should really be called The Mystery of BBC Publicity.

The Bagman by John Arden

The Bagman
by
John Arden

One of my favorite plays in its own right, The Bagman is also an important play in terms of critical discussion. Elissa Guralnick features it in her book Sight Unseen,where it plays an interesting contrast to John Arden's later masterpiece of radio, Pearl. There are three reasons you should listen to this play.

1. Because Guralnick discusses it in her book.
2. John Arden's later masterpiece Pearl is in thematic dialogue with it.
3. It's brilliant.

A surreal modern parable, the play combines song, verse, and drama into a cohesive exploration of a theme – the responsibility of an artist in relation to society. It's a provocative and important question. Does the artist have a duty to reflect the truth of the world as he sees it? Does the artist have any real power to make a difference?

The star of the play is Alan Dobie, a fine British actor who gives a tense performance (which is his specialty) and is a direct stand-in for Arden himself. I love the unsettling dream-logic of this play, and the unusual specific imagery of the little wooden people. Perhaps they have a cultural correlation to some real, traditional form of amusement, but in this case the sentient wooden people in the sack are creepy and mysterious. They are powerful and helpless at the same time. They are beyond the author. And us.

I don't think that there is a very happy message in The Bagman. But it asks questions that are worth asking, even while the creative compulsion spurs artists onward.

Download Here