British Radio Drama- A Cultural Case History
by Tim Crook
Page Five
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Tom Stoppard's successful and significant stage play, Indian
Ink, was conceived and first produced as the radio play In the Native
State. I am prepared to argue that John Tydeman's radio direction was better
than any stage presentation of the text. Britain's foremost living woman
stage playwright is Caryl Churchill. But the majority of her first experiences
with professional drama production were as a radio playwright. There were 9
productions with BBC radio drama up until 1973 when her stage work began to be
recognised at the Royal Court Theatre. Hanif Kureishi, regarded as one of
Britain's leading Asian writers, famous for his film My Beautiful
Launderette and his novel The Buddha of Suburbia was first produced
in radio. Tom Stoppard's first professional production was in the fifteen minute
Just Before Midnight slot on BBC Radio which showcased new dramatists.
Joe Orton was discovered by radio drama and first produced in this slot.
In 1963 BBC radio director, John Tydeman, advised rewrites
and a change of title and The Ruffian On The Stair became Orton's
dramatic debut. John Tydeman also read one of his stage scripts, Entertaining
Mr Sloane, and suggested he send it to the influential agent Peggy Ramsey
who confirmed that he was a writer of outstanding promise, and married the
script with theatre producer Michael Codron. The play rapidly snowballed into a
West End success. Sue Townsend, Harold Pinter, Alan Ayckbourn, Alan Plater,
Anthony Minghella, Angela Carter, Alan Bleasdale, Willy Russell and Louis
MacNeice are a few other literary luminaries whose roots were planted in radio
drama. Ayckbourn worked with the legendary radio drama director Alfred Bradley
in Leeds. Giles Cooper, who is better known for his radio plays, started as a
radio actor. Robert Bolt learned the craft of writing by producing scripts for
Children's Hour. The radio productions in 1960 of Harold Pinter's two
short plays, A Slight Ache and A Night Out, are credited with
creating the favourable critical climate for his first major stage success, The
Caretaker.
Several critics have argued that radio is the natural home
for the theatre of the absurd, and there was something approaching a revolution
in radio drama between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s, with Giles Cooper,
Samuel Beckett, Rhys Adrian, Frederick Bradnum, Harold Pinter, James Saunders,
Barry Bermange, Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard.
It is now clear that the early exponents of original
writing for radio felt compelled to compensate for its blindness by celebrating
rich verbal textures and colours for the ear. Dylan Thomas's 'Under Milk Wood'
is an obvious example of this achievement. The new generation of writers
engaging the absurdist tradition employed minimalist styles of dialogue and the
power of subtext in language to stimulate the imagination of the radio drama
listener. Original radio plays of exceptional stature have bridged the 'Look
Back In Anger' generation with the present day. They include David Rudkin's
Cries from Casement As His Bones Are Brought to Dublin (1973) and John
Arden's Pearl (1978), Robert Ferguson's Transfigured Night
(1984) and Howard Barker's
Scenes from an Execution (1984) and Anthony Minghella's Cigarettes
and Chocolate. (1988).
One of the paradoxes of radio drama is that highly
accomplished and revered writers who have chosen to specialise in this field
remain locked in a cabinet of obscurity. Rhys Adrian died in 1990 having written
32 plays for radio, all of which had been broadcast. Their literary quality is
marked by the fact that most were broadcast on the Third Programme and then
Radio Three. This is the BBC's cultural channel which is stamped with the kudos
of intelligentsia approval. John Tydeman directed 27 of them. Adrian received
several awards, yet a writer whose drama 'reflected a questioning mind and a
sensitive ear for the agony and laughter of ordinary lives' has no mainstream
cultural resonance. The same can be said of Giles Cooper who in the late 1950s
and early 60s had a didactic force which paralleled the desire to recognise new
voices and directions in British theatre. He cultivated the art of dramatically
counterpointing the exterior and the interior of characters who felt themselves
'trapped in the contemporary machinery of modern life and who were unable to
escape'.
Cooper wrote over sixty scripts for BBC Radio. His 1957
play The Disagreeable Oyster, along with the production of Samuel
Beckett's All That Fall were fundamental in creating the need for a
permanent sound workshop to create aural images based on effects and abstract
musical rhythms. The BBC's annual radio drama writing awards were named after
him and his radio script Unman, Wittering and Zigo was made into a film
starring David Hemmings. Yet he could never be said to be a household name. If
you cared to mention his name within earshot of a contemporary cultural crowd,
you might be greeted with the withering question "Who?"
John Mortimer in his autobiography Clinging To The
Wreckage describes how the BBC radio drama director Nesta Pain repeatedly
badgered him into writing his first radio play, Dock Brief. He says the
experience was 'to his lasting benefit'. She elicited a rewrite of the language
for one of the central characters, and Mortimer realised he 'was able to learn
something of lasting value from a director'. Dock Brief became the
catalyst for a meeting with theatre producer Michael Codron and launched his
career as a playwright. John Mortimer's son Jeremy has been at the heart of the
BBC Radio Drama Department over the last two decades and has developed an
international reputation as a dramaturge and director. He originated the
national young writers' festivals which have ushered in a new generation of
writers and opportunities for multi-cultural expression and representation.
Economic instability and the political pressure to reduce
public expenditure presents hazards of boom and bust fluctuations in investment
and production. The radio drama production environment becomes insecure and
inconsistent. The pre-requisite for public funding is sometimes predicated on
how well state funded radio drama performs in comparison with the audience
surveys of its commercial counterparts. BBC Radio Drama has been a casualty of
these socio-economic dynamics. The play form for Radio Four has now been limited
to one hour. The Script Unit has been abolished, the status of new writing
downgraded, and bold and 'dangerous' plays have been ghettoised onto Radio Three
which caters for the minority intelligentsia. John Tydeman's outstanding
direction and production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in 1993
was placed on Radio Three. Its two and a half hour length would not have been a
discredit to Radio Four, which in 1995 studded its Sunday schedule with eight
half hour sequences of a surround sound dramatisation of Len Deighton's novel
Bomber. Impressive productions of Shakespeare's plays are rarely
scheduled on Radio Four and now seem condemned to a form of elitist cloistering
on the successor to the Third Programme.
The pressures which liquidated the new dramatist's
television studio play in favour of filmed series and serials have been visited
on Radio Drama. Economic ideology imported by the Director-General, John
Birt, and multi-million pound surveys produced by outside management
consultants, with audience focus groups have marginalised talented and
experienced editors and producers such as John Tydeman, Martin Jenkins, Sean
McLaughlin, Jane Morgan and Nigel Bryant. Children's drama, or young story
telling sequences have been liquidated. The first Radio Five Network between
1989 and 1994 pioneered a 'young in mind and young at heart' approach to radio
drama production. Editor Caroline Raphael introduced new writing and performing
voices. The network became an alternative production base for writers and
actors, but was then sacrificed on the altar of BBC programming politics. The
network made way for a more successful twenty four hour news and sport channel.
Caroline Raphael became the Radio Drama Department's first
woman editor and she has been followed by the award-winning and innovative
Manchester director Kate Rowland. However, children's drama has not survived as
a regularly scheduled mainstay of BBC radio drama production and broadcast. A
minority half hour Radio Four slot on Sunday evenings has not been preserved in
the new controller's scheduling changes which took effect in April 1998. It
could be argued that the death of children's drama on BBC radio is an
astonishing failure of public broadcasting philosophy and is in marked contrast
to the experience in the USA where independent production companies maintain
successful series and broadcast projects on a wide range of station formats.
Eva Stenman-Rotstein at the publicly funded Swedish Radio
Broadcasting Corporation has steered a series of evolutionary changes to young
people's radio drama that has captured a new generation of listeners.
Story-telling for children and young people has reinvented itself and
'delivered' audiences.
A further development at the BBC in 1997 saw the Radio
Drama Department losing its editorial independence and become a production
server to network controllers and commissioning editors whose decisions depend
on the expectation of audience building and satisfaction. BBC World Service
radio drama has lost its brilliant autonomous production culture. The devaluing
of the licence fee has reduced the budgets and consequently the scope for
diversity and scale of production. The suffocating market bureaucracy of
'Producer Choice' has meant that the BBC's radio drama directors / producers
have to show due consideration for paying for the cost of even one editing razor
blade. The same amount of paper work is expended in the ordering of an item of
equipment costing one pound as commissioning an established writer to produce a
script for five thousand pounds. The Radio Drama repertory company of actors
diminished from about 30 in the early 1980s to only 6 in 1999. When a pressure
group and academics sought to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the broadcast
of 'The Comedy of Danger' actors and producers said they feared for the
future of radio drama. The Giles Cooper Awards set up to recognise new writing
in radio drama were deleted.
It would appear that 'professional autonomy' in radio
drama production at the BBC is facing its greatest intensity of constraints and
pressures. Between 1995 and the year 2,000 BBC radio production and broadcast
has undergone radical changes in 'institutional organisation'. Any initial
occupational socialisation by staff has been rapidly re-aligned. This has
resulted in compulsory and voluntary redundancies. Unlike Reith and successive
Director-Generals it would appear that Sir John Birt has rewritten the aims and
objectives of the institutional organisation. On the inside market economic
imperatives and catastrophic management and technology changes. On the outside
the BBC's public service remit remains, but Parliament is being asked to
increase the BBC's room for manoeuvre in commercial and global fields and to
enjoy complete autonomy with regard to the changes to the institutional
organisation.
The only regulatory constraints have been to account for
policy, actions and complaints before the House of Commons committee on Media,
Culture and Sport. The Office of Fair Trading has sought to prevent a
non-competitive cartel operating in television independent production where
there has been a statutory threshold of 25% of output. The obligation in the
context of national radio networks was 10% and only voluntary.
The economic constraints have been increases in inflation
and operating costs beyond the proportionate increase in licence fee income, the
risk of licence fee non-payment, and the need to divert existing programming
budgets for radio and television to support a 17 million pound investment in
Internet media and digital/satellite channel projects such as the twenty four
hour news channel 'News 24'.
One strategy for maintaining professional autonomy in BBC
radio drama production has been the move to ensure corroboration and
confirmation of 'cultural creativity'. This is the recognition of artistic
merit through awards and independent critical coverage. It is postulated that
the reputation generated by such accolades protect the artist/professionals
from the oppressive constraints of institutional organisation. Unfortunately a
new trend is emerging to disturb the certainty of the 'cultural creativity'
factor. There is evidence that the BBC realises that public opinion and
Parliamentary approval for the BBC's licence fee depends on winning cultural
celebration and approval, primarily within the UK. At what price and at what
cost will the BBC ensure that it wins the major prizes? The advantage of
this imperative is that the BBC is constrained to support professional
infrastructures of production which can consistently achieve recognition for
cultural creativity.
It is problematic when the BBC controls the mechanism for
cultural recognition and manipulates the parameters for selecting 'cultural
creative achievement'. For the edition of 11th to 17th July 1998 the Radio
Times, the largest selling magazine in Britain and with the BBC as the major
shareholder, decided to invite its readers to 'vote for your all-time greats'.
It explained that: 'As there are so many memorable programmes and people to
choose from, we asked a panel of experts to help you decide by nominating what
they have enjoyed most'. The magazine explained that anyone was open to
'disagree with their suggestions, just add your own'. People sending in their
votes were automatically entered for a competition to win a widescreen
television. Here was an example of the BBC through its powerful Radio Times
gathering together the 'great and good' of broadcasting to identify the 'best
radio drama' in Britain produced and broadcast over the previous 75 years.
Not surprisingly all the nominated productions had been made by the BBC. One of
the panel, Paul Donovan, was to later declare in his Sunday Times newspaper
column that the BBC had had virtually no competition in radio drama. Eight of
the nominated productions were titles in the BBC's Radio Collection of audio
cassettes which had a majority share of the spoken word market. The promotion
therefore had a hidden commercial purpose and resonance masquerading as a
cultural creative celebration and appreciation.
The productions selected were:
'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1989 starring Clive
Merrison and Michael Williams.)
The Archers (first national broadcast 1951)
Bomber (1995, starring Sam West)
Cigarettes and Chocolate (1988, starring Juliet Stevenson
and Bill Nighy)
Jude the Obscure (1986, starring Michael Pennington)
Lord of the Rings (1986, starring Ian Holm and Michael
Horden)
Spoonface Steinberg (1997, starring Becky Simpson)
A Tale of Two Cities (1989, starring Charles Dance)
Under Milk Wood (1954, starring Richard Burton and Rachel
Roberts)'
It is not clear that all members of the panel were
involved in the selection of the radio drama nominees, but only 10 out of the
27 'experts' had any professional or critical experience of radio. None were
radio drama directors or producers. Only two had had any experience of
writing radio drama and one of those specialised in comedy sketch writing. No
one from independent radio, which by this time commanded the majority share of
UK listening, was invited to join the panel. Despite the presence of the
screenwriter and playwright Alan Plater as a member of the panel, the Radio
Times feature on the competition omitted any mention of the authors or writers
of the productions nominated. The artists associated with each production were
the 'stars' in stage, screen or television. This assertion of the 'star' or
performer in the hierarchy of importance suggests a down-grading of the
writer which had been a feature of the film world and television. As Hortense
Powdermaker had stated in her anthropological investigation of 'Hollywood, The
Dream Factory':
'From a business point of view, there are many advantages
in the star system. The star has tangible features which can be advertised and
marketed- a face, a body, a pair of legs, a voice, a certain kind of
personality, real or synthetic - and can be typed as the wicked villain, the
honest hero, the fatal siren, the sweet young girl, the neurotic woman...Here
is a standardised product which they can understand, which can be advertised
and sold, and which not only they, but also banks and exhibitors, regard as
insurance for large profits.'
The Radio Times had decided that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
Len Deighton, Anthony Minghella, Thomas Hardy, Tolkien, Lee Hall, Charles
Dickens and Dylan Thomas were not important enough to identify.
It may well be premature to mark the recent changes at the
BBC as the start of a snowballing decline of BBC radio drama and the potential
extinction of a great tradition. On the 27th of January 1997, BBC Radio Four
transmitted a rather simple monologue by Lee Hall performed by the young actress
Becky Simpson. The single voiced narrative was interspersed with the simple
adroitness of operatic extracts sung by Maria Callas. Spoonface Steinberg
was part of a series called God's Country, but the charming, moving and truthful
expression of a 7 year old character who was affectionately known as 'Spoonface'
because of the shape of her face touched every adult's protective parental
instinct and resonated the cruelty of death through the injustice of the child's
agony. Spoonface is seven years old, Jewish, autistic, very bright - and
terminally ill with cancer. The character presents a dimension of natural
courage which we would all wish to find and the depiction of the heroic role in
a character so young is in itself a brave step in the genre of dramatic writing.
It is the doctor who introduces Spoonface to the passion of opera and she is
able to apply her homespun philosophy to the divas who complete their
performances with spectacular stage deaths.
It was a rare event indeed for a BBC radio production to
stimulate the receipt of hundreds of letters and phone-calls. The one hour
production was immediately introduced in bookshops as part of the BBC's Radio
cassette Collection and has become a best-seller. The marketing of the anonymous
quotation: 'This was the most poignant piece of radio I have heard for years. I
am a truck driver and was in tears' may be apocryphal, but the response of
Gillian Reynolds in the Daily Telegraph: 'Hall's writing is funny, intense and
poetic', Paul Donovan in the Sunday Times 'Inevitably harrowing but also blackly
funny' and Sue Arnold in the Observer 'Magnificently performed by 10 year old
Becky Simpson' were real enough. It is most unusual for the commercial arm of
the BBC, BBC Worldwide, to find a commercial benefit from marketing an original
play by a relatively obscure new writer.
A more challenging concept in the audio-drama genre is
where improvised or scripted live performance interacts with contexts of
reality. This type of storytelling has a satirical or entertainment purpose and
often involves duping people with impersonations and delivering a hoax frame of
narrative for the listener. Chris Morris whose series 'Blue Jam' in the early
hours of the morning on BBC Radio One has developed the role of a contemporary
'dissident bard'. The humour and improvisation is socially and politically
satirical as well as demonstrating postmodernist styles of ambient sound
texture and dislocated and disrupted narrative direction.
© Tim Crook, 1999
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