Writing for Radio

Annie Caulfield

• Publisher: Crowood
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781847973306
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Writing for Radio -- A Practical Guide offers advice and inspiration for anyone thinking of writing or beginning to write for radio. The book focuses mainly on radio drama techniques, with advice from producers and experienced writers, but also covers documentary writing, radio soaps, radio comedy and essential advice on how to begin and maintain a career. Topics covered include: Dialogues and monologues Using sound Scenery and action Adaptations, abridgements and biographies

1 WHY WRITE A RADIO PLAY?

A television producer once told me that I was wasting my time writing radio drama. They described it as ‘a sideshow of a sideshow’.

Radio drama may not pay dizzying sums, or bring immediate fame and glittering prizes. It might bring a line in the Radio Times rather than a name in lights, but for writers, radio is a place where they are treated as being at least as important as the studio runner; they can be involved in the process from start to finish and they can have a production realized that comes very close to the production they imagined.

Radio has been a way in to a career as a dramatist for many successful writers and is revisited by just as many who are far above the sideshow level of their careers. Tom Stoppard, Edward Bond, Howard Barker, Anthony Minghella, Peter Barnes, Roy Williams, Sarah Daniels, Mark Ravenhill, Lee Hall – there’s a very long list of contemporary writers who don’t think radio is too obscure or old hat, who choose to revisit to the medium’s special qualities.

The limits on radio drama are those we put on it ourselves: habit, low expectations, our preference for the familiar and, well, the usual shortage of genius.

John Taylor, Creative Director, Fiction Factory Productions

RADIO DRAMA – BIGGER THAN YOU’D THINK

This book is intended to inspire and encourage people to begin their writing careers in radio. They may already be writing and need to branch out, perhaps taking a rest from the treadmill of television series writing and wanting to try something where the writer has more freedom from interference. Or perhaps the writer is considering the different possibilities available in radio drama compared with stage drama.

With the exception of those few writers who attract massive Broadway or West End audiences, a stage play will not achieve the audience figures of a radio play. The average audience figure for a BBC radio afternoon play in 2008 was 600,000. Your first play on at the Royal Court or the Cottesloe couldn’t achieve these figures in a month of performances. It wouldn’t be physically possible, no matter how crammed the theatre was every night. A first radio play has this ready-made audience of over half a million people.

If a novel sold over half a million copies the publishers would be buying the author lavish lunches and marking them out as a rising star. A radio dramatist can achieve a massive audience and no one will know their name; except the listeners they touched with their writing, of course – those hundreds and thousands of listeners.

Radio may not be a high profile writing form, but it’s far from being a sideshow.

INTERNATIONAL AUDIENCES

A radio play will go out all over the world; what the writer wants listeners to think and feel is not restricted to those with the price of a ticket. Audiences in the furthest locations can pick up British radio through the internet; they can listen through internet repeat facilities at a time to suit themselves. With battery power and wind-up portables, radio can go where electricity runs out and television satellite signals are blocked. Many successful radio plays are sold in boxed set recordings so their life goes on and on.

AUDIENCE REACTION

A good radio play does not go unnoticed by the people it is really for, the listeners. There is no heady moment of applause at the curtain call; but then again, the writer is spared the agony of watching a first night audience for a flicker of the right reaction on their faces. There are reviews and previews in national papers, but the writer doesn’t have to suffer the tension of a theatre press night. A bad review for a radio play is distressing, a bad mark for the writer, but it won’t make or break the production; the play has already been broadcast, or is scheduled for broadcast. Reviews and previews for radio drama tend to be tucked away at the back of the television section, so the audience is more likely to make up their minds to listen based on the subject matter, the lead actor, recognizing the writer’s name or, most importantly, the first few minutes of the broadcast.

Radio drama can never compete with film and television for audience numbers. Yet a good radio play won’t fail to find a distributor, or be dropped because of changes in management at the station. Once a radio play has been commissioned, the writer can rest content that it will reach the audience. There are rare exceptions to this that I’ll explain later but a radio play seldom gets commissioned only to sink without a trace.

Radio drama sometimes hits the doldrums. The plays become safe and the audience as predictable as the customers for different types of daily news papers. There are loyal listeners and there are those who would never listen to radio drama any more than they’d buy a broadsheet newspaper. At times like these, writers avoid the medium because they see it as being too staid, too cosy – and not a proper home for their shocking truths or unnerving jokes. They take their ideas elsewhere and their audience isn’t tempted to try radio. Then a new wave of producers and writers comes in and battles are fought to change the audience profile.

NEW AUDIENCES

It is unlikely that seventeen-year-olds will suddenly be attracted to radio drama in droves; they have far better things to do – although students do listen, particularly to comedy. But older listeners, who may previously have felt excluded because of race, sexuality or range of interests, or possibly have just been bored, might be tempted by changes in the radio drama output to begin listening, or return to listening, and spread the word. For example, Radio 3, perceived home of classical music, serious arts documentaries and classical drama, recently produced a play by Caryl Phillips about soul singer Marvin Gaye – a new direction, attracting new listeners.

For some of the audience, a radio drama may be their last link with a world they can’t access because of failing health, or because they live in a remote or dangerous place. Conversely a radio drama may open the eyes of the thriving and comfortable to events and emotions they never imagined would bother them.

THE POWER OF SOUND

It’s unusual to walk through even the smallest of towns without hearing music playing, talk radio blaring, dogs barking, traffic roaring by (or grunting through a snarl-up), not to mention umpteen overheard conversations. Unless we wear very powerful headphones, we can’t shut sound out. There’s no equivalent of closing our eyes to keep it all out.

Sounds can be overwhelming – a helicopter overhead, party music next door, a verbose fellow passenger on the train – we talk about unwanted noise driving us mad. We like to choose what we hear, so if the sound is too loud, grating or unavoidable, it becomes a torment. We talk about noise making us feel that we can’t think straight.

In order to think straight we might, after a difficult day, put on music we love, or seek out quiet. Sound, we know already, can trouble or soothe our thoughts. Sound can overwhelm our emotions. Writing for radio means taking a very powerful route into a listener’s emotional life.

The actor is talking right into the microphone. The listener may be inches away from the radio speakers. There’s an extraordinary intimacy in radio.

Anne Edyvean, BBC drama producer

WHO IS LISTENING?

There are outbursts of market research at BBC radio. Figures show that the average listener to radio drama is over forty and educated. There is a high proportion of female listeners and retired people. There is, however, no reason why the dramas should only reflect the world the listeners inhabit. Part of the reason for listening is to learn something, to feel involved in worlds unvisited; to empathize with situations we haven’t experienced, but nevertheless could, one day.

So many times I have heard someone say, ‘I heard a really interesting radio play this week.’ And they go on to describe something that I know is outside their world. They have overheard another world, had an aspect of the past illuminated or been forced to stretch their mind to imagined futures. People seldom say, ‘I heard a radio play today. It was so interesting because it was about someone exactly like me.’

It may depend how interesting the listener is I suppose.

Listeners are more likely to recognize situations and emotions, and to be interested to hear how someone very different copes, triumphs or fails in that situation. It is never a good idea to try to pre-empt the nature of the audience for a radio drama. A listener may be someone who is completely outside the demographic, just flicking along the dial – your play may have surprised them by appealing to them and a convert has been made. Or they may be a habitual listener, somewhat tired of the plays about educated female retired people, and relish an insight into Northern Soul, Eritrean freedom fighters or Icelandic teenage angst.

It is better to imagine drawing an audience. Find a subject and style of writing that will attract attention. Think of ways to hold their attention – some techniques for this will be explained in this book, but an individual vision, an urgency and energy in the writing are essential. Even habitual listeners can turn off and they are never as easy to second guess as market research might suggest. Educated people over forty are all very, very different. Female listeners do not want to hear domestic dramas all the time, any more than older listeners lack any curiosity about the world that teenagers live in today.

I can do all kinds of other things while I listen to radio drama, and I don’t have to share the listening experience with anyone else if I don’t want to. I can devise my own scenery, and draw the faces of the characters.

Marilyn Imrie, independent drama producer

THE UNEXPECTED AUDIENCE

Radios run on mains electricity, batteries or by a clockwork mechanism. Radio can be heard through digital television, car stereos or on the internet. Listeners could be in the garden or in a factory; they could be in a desert or a jungle. The portability of radio means the audience is more unpredictable than that of a theatre or cinema audience. Listeners want the radio with them for company, for distraction, or for information – but they have seldom made a commitment to listen. A radio audience is all over the place, listening in all sorts of ways but is easily distracted.

Online radio stations are proliferating, there are more and more independent broadcast stations and the pirate stations run from teenagers’ bedrooms are ever present. Radio is a difficult medium to suppress. It can reach beyond electricity and beyond boundaries. This is exciting – but wherever they are, the listener can still wander off or switch off.

It can be mind-boggling to think how far away a radio audience might be. It is also mind-boggling to think how the audience might differ in culture, age, ethnicity, experience and education. Trying to second guess where the audience is, what they might be doing and who they might be is a problem for market researchers, not writers. A writer writes to express something in themself; if they’ve expressed it well, then it communicates. Who the writer communicates with is unknowable. Arthur Miller said that he felt he was casting his bread upon the waters when he wrote a play. With radio drama the waters are broad.

Occasionally, as if a message in a bottle has been returned, the reaction of a listener rather than a critic, can come back to astonish the writer. The BBC World Service soap opera Westway had audiences of up to thirty-five million for its fifteen-minute dramas about West London doctors. These listeners were in Africa, India and America. Fan mail came in from workers in remote power stations in China and truck drivers in Seattle. Then there was a heart-rending email from a group of women in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan who listened to the programmes in secret meetings.

Some World Service listeners had complained about Westway when it first went on air, feeling that the BBC World Service was no place for something as trivial as a soap opera. For the women in Afghanistan, Westway was profoundly important; it reminded them of a world were women were doctors, drivers, nurses, householders – and all able to speak their minds. It was far from trivial to them.

Who is listening? You never know.

WHEN NOT TO WRITE A RADIO PLAY

If you have a very visual imagination perhaps film and television would be better for you as a writer. If you like in-depth analysis of ideas rather than glancing insights, then your imagination might be better suited to prose. The key to radio drama is the dialogue; if you don’t relish the way people speak and notice the words left unsaid in their sentences, then this may not be the best place to begin writing.

If you concentrate on facts about radio demographics and scan statistics of successful radio plays of the past, then you might be going about things the wrong way. The most important thing is to tell the story you want to tell, knowing that in your own mind you can hear voices telling it. It could be twenty voices or just one. Capturing how those voices sound is more important than knowing a great deal about the technicalities of radio production and commissioning processes.

Technicalities and script layout will be addressed in this book but are not as troublesome as first-time writers might imagine. If the writer listens to radio, glances at some typical scripts and uses their common sense, their talent will out. However, it may not come out if it isn’t there. Just as someone can have all the music lessons time allows and the best guitar in the world, it won’t make them Eric Clapton. Then again, no one knows if they’re Clapton till they try, and it helps the audience appreciate you if you’ve learnt to play recognizable notes.

IS ANYONE GOING TO LISTEN?

In normal circumstances, radio has the advantage that it doesn’t dominate the listener’s attention. They can drive, baby-sit, cook, build a shed and go jogging while listening to the radio. Radio is company through dull chores or lonely tasks, while not stopping the listener doing what needs to be done. Any situation where a person can do something while having a conversation at the same time is a situation where they could be li...