Category: Radio

The BBC have announced a prototype website covering the past sixty years of BBC World Service Broadcasts, including over eight hundred radio plays among the 70,000 pieces in the archive. This is an extraordinary effort and deserves the highest attention and even a little begrudging praise from those like me who tend to be naysayers wherever Auntie is concerned.

Thoughts on this year’s BBC Audio Drama Awards.

I wrote about the BBC Audio Drama Awards last year but without much criticism. This year’s shortlist makes me a bit more critical.

Displaying an immense range of knowledge and interests, his radio plays run the diapason of thematic concerns. Yet whatever his subject be, Mr. Pownall’s plays are distinctive and brilliant. They reveal the deft hand of a master who truly believes in the power of a medium often in danger of being reduced to radio gaga and triviality.

Professor Guralnick’s analysis is text-based. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. However, one can go too far.

When it comes to audio drama, BBC rules the roost. Like it or not, BBC remains the largest producer of audio drama in the English language, if not the world. To discuss audio drama at all, one has to deal with the BBC and their chokehold on the history of the field.

Giving Prof. Guralnick the benefit of fair doubt, I believe her goal in writing the book is to expand the audience for radio drama by proving its link to stage drama, to discuss playwrights who are best known for their stage work, rather than playwrights who write specifically for radio. I cannot argue against her choice of material. What I will argue is that the approach probably confirms more biases than it dispels.

Artists like Norman Corwin strove toward an idea of radio as an artist’s studio with radio drama as a natural product of the process. Yet as so often typical in American culture, singular artistic visions hardly merit a mention in histories of radio. The idea of an artist’s studio went largely ignored, because the goal of OTR was not to produce art but rather to produce consumers.

While many people are certainly satisfied with the absence of a canon for radio drama, the lack of one has dismal consequences.

At first glance it would appear the BBC have made progress after the failure of the Giles Cooper Awards. Award-winning material, especially of such high caliber, should be made available to the public so that they can revisit it. The Beeb have at least re-broadcast most of the plays, and they have made a couple available for purchase. However, the issue of access to all the plays remains inelegantly unresolved.