No red carpet was rolled out on Sunday night when the first ever Audio Drama Awards were presented to best actor (David Tennant), best actress (Rosie Cavaliero), best drama (The Year My Mother Went Missing)…in a Hollywood-Lite ceremony at Broadcasting House. No tears were shed as the winners sought desperately to find the right words — not too smug, neither too self-immolating. There were no cheesy jokes from a rancid comedian as compère (David Tennant took on the role formerly reserved for Ricky Gervais). But at last, after 89 years of plays on the BBC, the extraordinary fact that at least once a day it’s possible to have a front-row seat in the most intimate of theatres-in-the-round and be taken out of your life and dumped in another is being grandly celebrated.
It’s impossible to keep up with the BBC’s output of new plays. Many excellent productions go unheard (11 this week, and that’s not counting the comedy series, the book adaptations, The Archers, the repeats on Radio 4 Extra). The writer gets paid (not much) and is lucky if anyone notices their work. The cast gets paid (not much, but enough to keep them going while ‘resting’ from active service). The production team might get a pat on the back from their BBC bosses, but who knows their names? Worst of all, many plays never get a second broadcast, so that all that effort disappears, after just 45 minutes of air time. The huge creative resources built up by the BBC have often been squandered — only last year the World Service lost its drama department. Why could it not have been saved and its expertise shared out among the other stations? Wouldn’t it be great to hear some young voices writing plays for output on Radio 1?
Until now there were few rewards for the writers, and little recognition beyond a 6pt credit in Radio Times, except for the Tinniswood Award and Imison Award, both of which have been going for more than a decade and which were also announced last night and presented by the playwright David Edgar. Yet nothing deters the endeavour, the desire to produce, write, perform in another play on radio. The combined effects of digitalisation (which means we can download some but not all plays and listen to them whenever and as often as we like) and recession are having a powerful impact on how radio drama is regarded. It’s one of the benefits of having to count your pounds — assessing not so much where cuts can be made as asking the question: how best can we make use of what we already have?
Drama is unique to the BBC; no other broadcasting service creates and airs so much original theatre. Forget news, forget sport. It’s the output of drama that gives the BBC its global selling point. It’s a resource that needs protecting. As Gordon House, the former head of World Service drama, once most poignantly said, the World Service is known for its news coverage but it’s the plays that listeners remember. Drama, says House, also sheds clearer light on the issues being debated in the news by taking you inside the situation, into its reality.
All that said, there is something strange about an awards ceremony where almost everything is ‘in-house’ — the only outside winners being for Best Online Only Audio Drama (Rock, about the life of Rock Hudson, written by Tim Fountain and made by Iain Mackness for the Independent Online) and Best Use of Sound (Bad Memories, a ghost story by Julian Simpson and sound engineered, for Sweet Talk Productions, by David Chilton and Lucinda Mason Brown). It began to feel a bit like a corporate shindig, with sweeteners being handed out to those who had successfully slotted into the company brand. As Johnny Vegas, who presented the award for Best Audio Drama, pithily reminded us, ‘It [the play] is not a pitch; it has to come from the heart…You have to sharpen it. You have to get better at it.’
Radio is the only medium able to take you wherever you want to go, through your thoughts. TV is too static, too one-dimensional; theatre too architectural. Let’s hope the awards become an annual event, that the prospect of going home with an audio gong does ‘sharpen’ the output, that we do hear more innovation in the way that sound is designed, thoughts projected.
Just as I was writing this, I turned on The Archers, and all that hope, inspiration, goodwill turned to dust as I heard Susan Carter smooching up to husband Neil. It was gruesome. Not just embarrassing, like being forced to sit next to a pair of snogging teenagers on the Tube, but also laughably out of character. It’s as if the writers are trying to turn the radio soap into EastEnders with sex, jealousy, greed at its heart rather than bovine flu and pigswill. Neil would never weaken in the face of an onslaught such as Susan’s. It won’t do. It just won’t do.
Comments