I love radio.
Like '50s sci-fi, The Beatles, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Quatermass, John Wyndham and Doctor Who, it's something I got into because of my dad. As a kid he would regale me with his reenactments of Journey into Space, as well as some other scary drama about skiers trapped in a cabin by an avalanche while an octopus-like space monster tried to eat them, which I’m pretty sure is an adaptation of The Trollenberg Terror. With these tales in mind, I used to await the Radio Times at Christmas (the only time of year when we felt sufficiently frivolous) to find out what dramas were going to be on Radio 4. I remember one year taping the Radio 4 adaptation of The Maltese Falcon and listening to it on my own at the far side of the room with headphones on while the rest of the family watched Christmassy stuff on telly.
Still as an adult, I love listening to radio drama. I have a good collection of BBC adaptations of stuff like Solaris and The Midwich Cuckoos, as well as original dramas such as Aliens in the Mind and The Slide, and I'm a big fan of Big Finish's original Doctor Who series, particularly Doctor Who Unbound. I've spent ages trawling the net to find old American radio show such as Quiet Please, which yielded such classics as The Thing on the Fourble Board (more info here). With this background, it's not surprising that working in radio drama was always a big ambition of mine.
If you've read my blog before, you'll know that back in 2010 I had the opportunity to compose the music for a Radio 4 Woman's Hour drama, entitled Amazing Grace, written by Michelle Lipton and produced and directed by Justine Potter. I've written about that already here, so I won't go over it again, except to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Thankfully, I don’t think I upset the team too much, as they got me back to compose for Cottonopolis at the following year.
Although I love radio drama as it is, I've often thought it a little strange, considering it being an exclusively aural medium, that music, and to some degree sound design, really only have a supporting role to the dialogue and only appear in the process at a very late stage. I would guess that this is largely due to the fact that in the early days these dramas were direct adaptation of plays that could have easily worked as stage dramas and that producers and directors are often from stage backgrounds. Of course, this makes perfect sense because it is radio drama and not music. However, I've felt for a long time that there is also room for radio dramas that do something different, something that can only be realised on radio, or at least is in its optimum form on the radio. There have of course been some dramas that fall into this category, such as Andrew Sachs' near legendary binaural radio play The Revenge, but they are few in number.
I’ve written previously about The Night Bride, a piece of music theatre I composed with Mike Sizemore, but I don’t think I wrote about how it was originally conceived as an new form of radio drama. We actually pitched it to the BBC with some fantastic art from David Kennedy. Sadly, I think it was considered a bit too “fantasy” at a time when they were looking for more gritty, urban drams.
Although, The Night Bride never had it’s moment as a radio drama, I do hope one day to release it online as an audio drama. Watch this space!