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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Reality bites

The Archers (BBC Radio 4); The Afternoon Play (BBC Radio 4); Between the Ears (BBC Radio 3)

Jenny, meanwhile, has at last woken up from her years as Brian’s doormat. (I might be making this up but wasn’t she a teenage rebel once upon a time with a healthy attitude to women’s lib?) On Friday night she finally told her creepy horrible husband what every self-respecting woman has been wanting her to say for years, ‘I’ll have to divorce you.’

Two heart-stoppers in fewer than 15 minutes of radio time. Who needs pictures to get involved in the drama? Next week, though, on Radio Four, you’ll be able to both listen and watch. In an experimental collaboration with Film London, the Afternoon Play on Wednesday and Thursday has also been filmed so that you’ll be able to tune into Radio Four and at the same time watch the action by turning on your digital TV and pressing the red button (or by logging on to the Radio Four website on your laptop). Instead of a group of actors conjuring up atmosphere, place and character in a soundproofed room, with a spot effects man to create the illusion that you’re listening to prayers in a Turkish mosque in the East End of London, or bustling through the high-tech world of Canary Wharf, they’ll be acting in situ just like the movies. It’s almost like saying, OK, radio has lost the battle for technological supremacy; drama needs to be more visual, more real to be effective in the 21st century. Mark Damazer, the Radio Four Controller, was brave enough to admit this to John Humphrys on the Today programme, but undaunted he insisted that it’s always good to experiment and to see what might then emerge.

That’s undeniable. But it’s also becoming more and more obvious that radio is much more likely to benefit from the new-generation technologies than television. It’s so much more flexible, so immediate, so available now in so many different formats — on the web, via your mobile or iPod, on TV. So why aren’t there more experimental audio series like Between the Ears (Radio Three, Saturday), which week-by-week strives to create a genuinely different aural experience.

This week’s programme (produced by Felix Carey and Philip Tagney) took us to a wind turbine farm, or rather it gave us Symphonies of Wind Turbines. Cleverly interspersed with the eerily hypnotic, swirling sounds of the spinning blades were comments from poets, scientists, environmentalists and a couple who are unfortunate enough to live just 935 metres from a new colony of them. The noise pollution is so bad that they now decamp every night from their home so that they can sleep in peace. On TV the people would have dominated the programme, with their vociferous opinions on these spooky new sky gods. On radio it was the swishing soundtrack which argued far more resonantly than any human voice.

More articles from: Kate Chisholm | this section

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