I wonder how many people still listen to plays on radio now that there is so much competition for our attention from Twitter, YouTube and the hours taken up with Strictly Come Dancing. It’s not just that we’re being taken over by techie gadgetry so that there is less and less time to do anything else. (How many photos have you got trapped on your computer with no time to sort through their nameless numbers and download on to a memory stick, let alone buy the right paper to print them, etc., etc.?) It’s also very difficult to follow the action in a radio play and get involved in the drama if you’re tempted to text, flick on to Google or download those dratted photos midway through. When all you’ve got to go on is what you can hear, with no visual clues, a degree of single-minded concentration is required that is fast disappearing in our multitasking times.
But the play’s the thing that really makes the BBC licence worth paying (and we need to remember that the licence fee funds radio just as much as it does TV), as any true radio buff will tell you. When they’re good, and quite a few of them are really good, there’s no beating the way a play on radio can take over your mind, sparking the imagination at the same time as offering the consolation of insight into other people’s lives.
This week’s Saturday-night drama on Radio Three (produced by Jessica Dromgoole) hit the spot, drawing us in because of its vivid aural atmosphere. This was in part created by recording it on location in Hackney, so that it captured the buzz of inner-city life, the hubbub and chaos of sound, the clash of so many different people living ear-to-ear. But the writing, too, was so real, so authentic that it was possible to believe we were overhearing actual conversations and not just listening to a group of actors masquerading behind a set of microphones.
The Lady of Kingsland Waste by J. Parkes takes four street kids, who are hanging out with nothing to do except to make trouble, and contrasts their noisy, stroppy lives with the quiet, resigned conversations between an old lady, Juliet, and her pastor as she lies dying in her flat. When 14-year-old Nathan, who lives in the same block as Juliet (beautifully played by June Bailey), is sent by his mother to buy her a pint of milk the two worlds coincide. His encounter with Juliet changes them both as she finds a reason to laugh and he discovers the ability to make contact with someone so very different from himself.
The dialogue between the kids was sometimes difficult to follow against the street noise, but it was worth making the effort for those intense moments with Juliet. At one point she asks the pastor why she’s being prayed for in her local church. ‘Why are you singling me out when love and mercy is what we all need?’ she asks, knowing full well what the answer will be. But the pastor at first does not want to tell her the truth, ‘Because…’ he fumbles. ‘Because I’m going to die soon?’ she puts the words into his mouth. A long, very long pause. ‘Yes,’ says the pastor, relieved that he no longer has to prevaricate. The writer then adds another line, which could so easily not have been there but which gives the conversation a whole other meaning. ‘Thank you,’ Juliet tells him.
It was such a simple scene — but so effective. And it worked, without mawkishness, because of the contrasting scenes with the kids, which were written by someone who knows their lingo and has captured their awkward, jangling attitudes (Parkes, the BBC website tells me, is a traffic warden in Islington). Sometimes 45 minutes is all you need to capture a moment of truth.
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