Home Front: Radio 4’s first world war drama will fight out the full four years

In a studio in Birmingham, there’s an air of excitement. Jessica Dromgoole and her team are recording new scenes for Home Front, Radio 4’s specially commissioned drama commemorating the first world war. They know that they’re about to launch on to the airwaves the boldest, most creative and enterprising venture yet heard on the station. The years of planning, of making endless decisions about how to do it, what to focus on, where to set it, which real stories to fictionalise, which to abandon, have paid off. A random scene between a volunteer at a makeshift hospital and a wounded soldier is being recorded. There’s no preamble, no explanation, just two people having a conversation. Yet the writing is so sharp and effective, not a word wasted, the characters so deftly drawn that I knew at once who these people were, their place in the drama, their hopes and fears, their inner sadness.

That’s the advantage of working on something about the war, says Dromgoole. Usually in drama, she explains, ‘you have first to explain the challenge, then go through the challenge and finally get over the challenge’. With Home Front, which will follow the war from start to finish in real time, day by day, for weeks at a time, tracking a cast of imagined families ‘against a background of heartbreaking truths’, none of that is necessary. ‘You don’t have to explain. The country is in crisis. That’s understood.’ There’s no need to give us a back story, the lead-up to the action. ‘They’re all coping with the challenge of being at war. No one is ever not busy. No one is not pursuing something against the odds. And most people are coping with a critical moment in their lives.’

A surprising feature of the series has emerged already: the scripts for these short, daily episodes (modelled on the formula pioneered by the 15-Minute Drama) have more words to the minute than usual: 2,400 words, for episodes that are actually 11 minutes and 45 seconds long.