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Powerful prose

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 29th October 2008

Afternoon Play (BBC Radio 4); The Choir (BBC Radio 3)

To the British Academy last week for a heartening prizewinning ceremony. No gongs, no red carpet, no dangerous stilettos on this occasion — not even a fabulous cheque to dole out to the winners. But instead tributes (and modest money) to the work of two writers — Adam Beeson and Stephen Wyatt — who have crafted original work for radio. The prizes are given each year in memory of two great radio men, the comic writer Peter Tinniswood, who made his name on TV but transferred, and the script editor and drama guru Richard Imison, who brought so many great writers over to the listening medium including Samuel Beckett, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter. The modesty of the annual event belies the significance of these prizes, one of the few to promote and praise the skills involved in developing scripts for broadcast. Without visual props, writers have to work doubly hard to think up an imagined scenario and then make it real. The dialogue has to give us enough information to imagine the scene without sounding clunking, ‘I’m now moving into the bedroom; cue door whingeing’, and at the same time to conjure up full-bodied characters, distinct from each other and recognisable by voice and speech patterns alone.

Both the winning plays were rebroadcast this week in the Afternoon Play slot on Radio Four; neither could have worked in the theatre, both took us to the edge of the audio experience, using the airwaves to recreate the way our minds work, seemingly full of random thoughts but always with some kind of connecting thread running through. On Thursday there was a chance to hear again Stephen Wyatt’s dramatic montage Memorials to the Missing, winner of the Tinniswood award and inspired by the story behind the founding of the Imperial War Graves Commission. Through a subtle weaving together of the facts and an imaginative reconstruction of the characters involved in the Commission, Wyatt took just 45 minutes to convey not just the horror of the Somme but also to explain the moral, ethical, social and emotional background to the creation of these cemeteries throughout the world, wherever British soldiers have fallen in action.

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