The Oscars and Audio Drama - the 2011 BBC Audio Drama Awards

On Sunday, the BBC will hold its first ever BBC Audio Drama Awards in London. What took them so long?

As someone who's actually lived in Hollywood, I know the importance of the Oscars. It's literally a holiday.. Anyone who shows up to work that day is there for the singular purpose of entering the Oscar pool. Here's the trick – just pick all the ones that Entertainment Weekly picks. They're usually right. Don't be like me and vote for the production with the most amusing title, or you will forever curse The Story of the Weeping Camel.

The Academy Awards were founded for one purpose that wasn't, and still isn't, about recognizing excellence. They shell out the big bucks to sell a product. Some people bemoan how Academy voting isn't fair, or how the taste of the voters is predictably mundane. In the same breath, people will weep (like a camel!) with delight when the scrappy underdog foreign contender wins. But you and I know that it's all a big gimmick so it doesn't matter. And that's ok.

The Oscars generate publicity like they were intended to. And they do have some curatorial merit. The winners are usually broadly appealing, quality productions. Not great art, necessarily, but they are usually things that can appeal to a mass audience. Perhaps the winners are not truly the best. They certainly are prone to unfortunate trends and pressures. But they're all reasonably good enough in some way to usefully promote their medium.

The Oscars provide other benefits as well. After the rhinestone sparkles fade from your eyes, the awards are still doing work. The logo gets slapped on DVD covers and posters. People watch films in anticipation of the event, and then rush to rent them when the winners have been named. The ceremony also brings together the industry into one big visible place, putting names to faces, and minting industry mythology. Watching the ceremony and the narratives constructed by it, casual viewers get a flavor and a proximity to the glamour, the tension, and the tears. And as the years go by, the list of winners remains, guiding new viewers to the old movies. That's how I came across Wings, the first film to win best picture. That and Clara Bow. Wow.

So – will the 2011 BBC Audio Drama Awards be the same mix of sex and glamour? Ah. Well. Let's not get our hopes up. But thank god someone's trying. There have been awards in audio drama for years – the Prix Italia, the Sony, the Imison, the Bradley, the Tinniswood, and the Giles Cooper. These awards have been shamefully squandered. Except the Giles Cooper Awards, which resulted in lots of plays being published. But the rest of the awards disappeared in a puff of microphone dust.

Who was the first Prix Italia winner? Where's the master list? An award doesn't do enough good unless it remains present. Sure, it recognizes excellence within its tiny context. But awards are entry points to excellence of years past. That's the tragedy of most of the radio drama awards of the past. They meant something to a small group of people, and didn't have an opportunity to mean something to more.

On the Audio Drama Wiki, you will find the complete list of Giles Cooper Award winners. I read every single volume and listened to a good amount as well. I've a bit more work to do, but eventually there will be an entry for every single play and author that was honored. It's a way in, allowing people to connect with the medium. I could give somebody a stack of CDs and say “here, listen to all this stuff,” but that would be useless and stupid. We shouldn't keep doing that to the medium we love. Instead, we should give our friends a list - “the Best Drama award winners,” or “these are my favorite plays”. Say “listen to these because they're special.” That's how you get people to care. Act like your work is special and other people will learn to love it, too. The affection transmits.

The BBC Audio Drama Awards are long overdo. It's the kind of institution that needed to be created to raise the visibility of the medium. But don't expect too much. Like the Academy Awards, this ceremony won't make everybody happy. It may reflect or create unwanted pressures in terms of artistic output. It might drive the industry toward plebeian, mass-market shlock. But it doesn't have to.

All it needs to do is make people notice audio drama more. I think it may be a turning point, if the BBC finally realizes that it's been treating the medium incorrectly.

Audio drama is fragile. That's really the point of all my posts, isn't it? Unique compared to other mediums, the way we present and organize audio drama, particularly online, has a significant impact on the ability for audiences to appreciate it. We need web design to reflect it in aesthetically graceful, visual ways. We need institutions to collect and maintain knowledge about it for us to access. And we need access to the output itself. I hope the Audio Drama Awards will do that.

In the meantime, I'm still trying to track down the complete list of Sony Award winners.

click for the list of all the Audio Drama Award nominees

Adaptation

In the next few weeks, I'll be delving into the world of Gormenghast. The poet, artist, and novelist Mervyn Peake created this world in three books: Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone. Brian Sibley recently dramatized the whole series for the BBC, including a new book by Peake's widow Maeve Gilmore, continuing the story.

But what happens when one cultural work is transferred into another medium? It happens very often. The two terms used are adaptation and dramatization. I'm not sure if these two terms mean the same thing, or contain distinctions. In the Audio Drama Wiki, we label everything a “dramatization” that is a radio version of a thing from a different medium. I chose the term arbitrarily.

Stage plays can also be included as dramatizations, when they are altered for radio. Interestingly, this distinction is not widely made when radio plays are adapted for the stage. In such cases, the radio play is typically ignored and treated as an inferior prototype. There are many examples of how this is clearly misconceived but I won't bother with that right now.

When discussing an adaptation, there is an inherent tension between people who like the original thing, and people who like the adapting thing. I get annoyed by these instances, because both sides routinely don't know what they are talking about. Let me dispel some confusion.

There are two possible courses of action for an author who uses a work to create another work. The first course is where an author translates that original work from one medium to another, changing where necessary, but ultimately remaining faithful to the thematic concepts behind the original work. That's a good adaptation.

The other course is where an author takes inspiration from something, maybe even taking direct elements of story or character, and creating a new thing. When authors take this course and simultaneously change mediums, people often mistake it for an adaptation. It is not an adaptation when the basic thematic elements, the artistic intention behind the original work, is not translated intact. It's something else, and I don't have a word for it. An “inspiration”? I dunno.

An example of a faithful adaptation is Harold Pinter's screenplay for The French Lieutenant’s Woman. In the original novel, John Fowles tells the story of Sarah Woodruff and her relationship with a married man. On the surface, the story is fairly straightforward. But a faithful adaptation could not merely dramatize this surface story and be true to the author's intentions.

Those intentions are revealed not in the narrative but in the author's voice in conveying the narrative – Fowles is everywhere in the text, making asides, pointing out things about 19^th century life, inserting himself as an authorial voice while simultaneously keeping the story going. The whole point of the novel is that it is not just a linear narrative, but a narrative that the author constantly compares and contrasts with modern life. The style of the thing is intrinsic to its meaning, and yet the style is the stuff of pure literature – a fabric of words and nothing else.

The screenwriter is therefore tasked with finding a filmic equivalent to Fowles' style. If the screenwriter doesn't do that, then it's not an adaptation. It would instead be like all of those random dramatizations of Jules Verne novels – the plot structures are superficially the same, but each version mints a new meaning (or at least abandons the original intention) in favor of whatever whims or fancies or corporate marketing the producers have in mind. So what did Pinter do?

Harold Pinter's screenplay solves the style problem by adding a new narrative. He creates a new set of parallel characters that are playing the characters that Fowles has created in a movie. It's a movie-within-a-movie, and a stroke of simple genius. The original narrative continues as planned, but is supplemented by the story of the making of the film and the two lead actors' relationship with each other. The comparison and contrast is there, the voice of modernity is there, and Fowles' intention is there.

Of course, there is sometimes room for debate as to what an author's intention is or was. That's fair enough. But while we might reasonably debate what Fowles' ultimate aims are, we can surely agree what is aims are not. They are not exclusively the surface narrative.

How does this relate to audio drama? Radio has, from the very beginning, been the domain of adaptation, I haven't thought much as to why. But a significant amount of BBC output is devoted to dramatizing classic literature, and if we are to consider these things not merely as facsimiles of novels and stage plays but as radio in and of themselves, then we have to have a basic criteria for analyzing them.

The author of a classic serial is not the author of the source work. It is the playwright who adapts it for the radio and writes the script. That's why each entry in the audio drama wiki of such a play says “Gormenghast is a radio play by Brian Sibley, based on the novel by Mervyn Peake”. The radio play is not by Peake. It's by Sibley. Once we are mindful of this emphasis we can consider these questions:

1. What is the intention of the author of the source work?

2. How has the author of the radio play rendered this intention?

3. What is the audio equivalent of the original author's style?

4. Is the radio version even an adaptation at all, or is it merely inspired by the source?

And now I have to re-listen to all the Gormenghast adaptations and try to answer these questions!

British Radio Drama, Cambridge University Press 1981

British Radio Drama

edited by
John Drakakis

One of the few collections of academic essays on the subject at hand, British Radio Drama is an essential book for the extended radio drama library. It's not the whole story, it's not definitive, and it's not up to date. But it covers some important topics that receive little attention elsewhere.

John Drakakis, the editor, wrote a good history of the medium in his introduction. There are essays on Henry Reed, Louis MacNeice, Giles Cooper, Dylan Thomas, Susan Hill, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Samuel Beckett. The last chapter, entitled “British radio drama since 1960” mentions Rhys Adrian, R.C. Scriven, Don Haworth, and a few others.

Perhaps the most useful aspect of the book are the appendices. Included is a list of plays with broadcast dates for the authors discussed, a list of published radio plays (very useful for scouring the internet in search of out of print copies), a selected bibliography, and extensive footnotes that lead to other sources.

The one great failing of the book (aside from being woefully out of date, since it was published in 1981) is that it doesn't connect the dots in terms of media theory. There isn't a build-up to a consensus about the medium in terms of what it essentially is. Which is why I often argue that Guralnick's Sight Unseen is so important. It's the logical next step in putting together the whole surveyed landscape of the medium in terms of why and how it works artistically.

I have found this book very useful for making additions to the Audio Drama Wiki, particularly in regards to Louis MacNeice. I will eventually tackle Under Milk Wood as well. It also has lead me to some interesting and overlooked avenues. One of the essays mentioned Muriel Spark, who apparently wrote a few radio plays herself:

Researching her and other novelists (such as Sayers, Susan Hill, and William Trevor) causes some very frustrating problems. People in the world of radio drama fandom are not always careful to distinguish between a play written by an author, and a play written by someone else as an adaptation. In the Audio Drama Wiki, we've designated these “dramatizations”, although in conversation I've often used “adaptation” and “dramatization” interchangeably. A topic for more discussion, surely. In the case I'm refering to, Muriel Spark had written original radio plays at some point, but the published versions of these does not contain broadcast information or cast information. A bit of a dead end there in terms of research for the wiki.

I also picked up this book of radio plays by Susan Hill:

They seem very interesting.

Another interesting find is in the mail. It's a book of radio plays by the blind and deaf poet R.C. Scriven. He might be my next project to tackle with the wiki. I'm hoping that the volume I've purchased contains information about him, because there is precious little to find on the internet.

And yet again, as with most of these writers, their work is unreachable in its native format. Although there may be recordings of these plays out there, many are missing and lost. And many more are poorly cataloged by collectors, particularly on the internet, who often neglect to distinguish between an original version (the one first broadcast) and later remakes. The Dark Tower, the Beckett plays, and the Pinter plays often suffer from this confusing state.