British Radio Drama - European MediaCulture

European Medi@Culture-Online 

http://www.european-mediaculture.org 

Author: Crook, Tim. 

Title: British Radio Drama – A Cultural Case History. 

Source: http://www.irdp.co.uk/britrad.htm [18.09.2003]. London 1999. p. 1-25. 

Publisher: Independent Radio Drama Productions. 

Published with kind permission of the author. 

Tim Crook 

British Radio Drama – A Cultural Case 

History 

Radio Drama can be produced by anybody with a microphone and a tape-recorder. The 

time is auspicious for rebirth of American Theatre, and radio could be a good place for it to 

happen.’ – David Mamet ‘Writing in Restaurants’, Faber & Faber 1986. 

It would not be any surprise to the reader that the one character in British broadcasting 

who would give drama a go on the radio was the charismatic Captain Peter Eckersley. He 

marshalled his friends in the famous former Royal Flying Corps hut at Writtle near 

Chelmsford. His own account of the adventure can be found in his 1942 publication ‘The 

Power Behind The Microphone’. In the absence of any other recorded evidence it would 

appear that he led the first radio drama experiment in British broadcasting history on 

October 17th 1922 from the research station at Writtle near Chelmsford, Essex in 

England: 

‘ We did a wireless play. We chose the balcony scene from Cyrano: it is played, on the 

stage, in semi-darkness with virtually stationary players and so it seemed very suitable for 

broadcasting. ‘Uggy’ Travers, a young actress and her brother came to help. We sat 

round a kitchen table in the middle of the wooden hut, with its shelves and benches 

packed with prosaic apparatus, and said our passionate lines into the lip of our separate 

microphones... 

It was all rather fun. Doubtless at times I was horribly facetious, but I did try to be friendly 

and talk with, rather than at, my listeners...We failed to take ourselves seriously, and 

1



broadcasting, as we saw it, was nothing more nor less than an entertainment, for us as 

much as the listeners.’ 

Two years later the BBC broadcast the first British play written for the radio medium. It 

was later translated into several different languages and in some countries it became their 

first radio drama production. Research by Kent University Drama lecturer Alan Beck has 

revealed important information and background on the cultural and artistic imperatives of 

story telling in a new medium. It is rather prosaic that Richard Hughes revealed in a 1956 

talk that he wrote the play overnight at the request of BBC producer Nigel Playfair. 

Fortunately parts of the text of his speech were reproduced in the BBC’s weekly 

periodical for the intelligentsia – ‘The Listener’. It is now defunct: 

‘ Those were the days of the silent film’, he said, ‘and our “listening play” (as I dubbed 

it) would have to be the silent film’s missing half, so to speak, telling a complete story by 

sound alone. Yet even the silent film did not, strictly speaking, rely on pictures only. It 

used sub-titles. Usually there was a sad man thumping appropriate themes on a piano. 

Some of the grander cinema-houses even employed an “effects man”; he wound a windmachine 

and pattered peas on a drum for the storm scenes; he accompanied the 

galloping cowboy with clashing coconut shells. We thought of using a narrator but agreed 

it would be a confession of failure. No, we must rely on dramatic speech and sound 

entirely – and it had never been done before. 

Our audience were used to using their eyes; this was a blind man’s world we were 

introducing them to. In time they would accept its conventions but how would they react on 

this first occasion? Better make it easy for them, just this once. Something which happens 

in the dark, for instance, so the characters themselves keep complaining they can’t see. 

Perhaps we could get the listener to turn out his lights and listen in the dark. 

“ Here’s a first line for you”, said Playfair. “The Lights have gone out!” Back in my flat in 

New Oxford Street I turned over possible situations. “The lights have gone out!” Not a 

bedroom scene – There was Major Reith to consider; nor did I care much about 

bedrooms, to be candid. An accident in a coal mine? I knew nothing about coal mines 

either, but it offered what I wanted technically. Total darkness; explosions and rushing 

water; the picks of the rescue-team, and that stripping of the human soul dramatists 

2



delight in. But all miners’ voices would be too hard to tell apart. Better a party of visitors – 

an old man, a young one, a girl. So I wrote all night and Playfair got his play with his 

morning coffee: “Danger”. 

With rehearsals and production however, a cold awakening! I had spread myself on sound 

effects without considering how they were to be done. Someone ran round the corner and 

enlisted the effects man from a cinema in the Strand – wind machine and all. But still we 

could make nothing sound as it was meant to sound; even in the studio, and leaving out of 

account the primitive transmission of those days which reduced all sounds to a single 

indistinguishable “wump” which might be the buzzing of a gnat, the clash of swords, the 

roaring of Niagara or the shutting of a door. Moreover the studio was a vast padded cell 

designed to make voices sound as if they were floating in outer space. 

How were we to make our voices sound like an underground tunnel? Playfair solved that 

one by making his cast put their handsome heads in buckets. And the Welsh choir we had 

collected (in those days, Welsh miners were singing in the London streets for coppers) – 

the script called for “distant snatches of hymn-singing”, but once started nothing could 

stop these chaps: only one studio, one microphone – Playfair put them in the corridor 

outside, with a sound-proof door he could open and shut. 

But the climax came when we said we wanted an explosion. The engineers had helped all 

they could, but this was the last straw. Even popping a paper bag would blow every fuse 

in Savoy Hill. But Playfair was something of a genius, and utterly unscrupulous. Reporters 

and critics were going to listen in a room specially provided for them, with its own loudspeaker. 

It would never do for them to hear no more than the diminutive “phut” like the 

roaring of a sucking-dove, even if that was all the public would get. So Playfair staged a 

magnificent “explosion” in the room next door to the press-room. Our “explosion” got top 

marks with the press. They never discovered they had heard it through the wall. 

And so – presumably for the first time in history, anywhere in the world – some sort of 

“listening play” specially written for sound somehow went on the air, thanks to Playfair’s 

ingenuity and the helping hands of all Savoy Hill. Radio drama had emitted its first, faint, 

infant wail.’ 

3



The broadcast of ‘Comedy of Danger’ generated coverage in at least one national 

newspaper. It certainly did not amount to the faint infant wail described by Richard 

Hughes. The headline in the Daily Mail on Wednesday 16th of January 1924 was ‘Drama 

Thrills by Wireless.’ 

The play was broadcast from the BBC’s London and Glasgow stations so it was not 

entirely nationwide. One newspaper writer acknowledged that Richard Hughes had to 

bear in mind that as his audience could not see the play the action had to be represented 

by sound to represent rushing water, explosions, and pick-axe tappings. Listeners-in were 

advised that as the action of the play took place in the dark, they should hear it in the 

dark, and many adopted the advice and lowered the lights. The Daily Mail reporter 

described the production of the play at Savoy House: 

‘ In a brightly lit room a young woman in evening dress and two men holding sheets of paper in 

their hands declaimed to a microphone their horror at being imprisoned in the mine. Outside the 

room a young man sat cross-legged on the floor, with telephone receivers on his ears, and as 

he heard through the receivers the progress of the piece he signalled to two assistants on a 

lower landing to make noises to represent the action of the play. In a passage stood five men 

singing through a partly opened door leading to the broadcasting room. They were a group of 

“miners” singing in another passage of the mine.’ 

At the end of the report the journalist observed that ‘Miss Joyce Kennedy, Mr. Kenneth 

Kent, and Mr H. R. Hignett acted very well.’ 

Radio Drama throughout the 1920s and 30s was heavily influenced by theatre. It is 

interesting that the story of the production of ‘the Comedy of Danger’ demonstrates that 

live sound design for silent cinema brought an acoustic inspiration into the radio studios at 

Savoy Hill and the BBC’s purpose built ‘broadcast liner’ in Portland Place. But the 

absence of talking cinema until the early 1930s meant that text and performance style 

tended to be declamatory and either suited to the projection of the voice in a large space 

to a live audience or highly literate and narrative voice based. Unlike the American and 

Australian radio stations the BBC had no direct competition for dramatic entertainment. 

There was no management pressure to compete for audience and ratings. When it came 

from the continental commercial stations, many of which transmitted American radio soap 

operas, the BBC doggedly pursued the established Reithian tradition of giving the 

audience what the BBC believes it needs rather than what it perceives to be its wants. 

This was always done with ‘Received Pronunciation’ – a Home Counties upper middle 

4



class, public school and Oxbridge educated accent. Regional accents in presentation 

were only permitted during the Second World War years. By the time Wilfred Pickles 

presented the news in a Yorkshire accent Sir John Reith had left the BBC and was making 

his contribution to public life as the Minister for Transport. 

In the inter-war years the distinction between radio drama and the dramatic feature was 

somewhat blurred. It is now very difficult to distinguish the fiction from the non-fiction since 

all documentary production and ‘talks’ were heavily censored and ad-libbed 

spontaneous radio communication was not permitted. It was a far cry from Peter 

Eckersley’s charismatic performances in the 2MT hut in Writtle in 1922, which infuriated 

the bureaucrats in Marconi, the BBC and Post Office, but captivated the imagination of 

listeners. Even when the BBC invited ‘real ’ people into the studio or sought to transmit 

the voices of the working classes, initial interviews had to be transcribed by secretaries, 

edited by producers and editorial managers and then given back to the original subjects to 

reproduce for live or pre-recorded broadcast usually with wooden and self-conscious 

presentation. Any departures from the agreed script would be faded out and the 

subversive miscreant discreetly shown the door of Broadcasting House. 

There was a substantial dishonesty in this infrastructure of communication. It could be 

argued that the audience was not being ‘educated’ and ‘enlightened’ but culturally 

brain-washed and socially propagandised. Communist or left wing producers such as 

Archie Harding who caused trouble were despatched to Manchester by Director General 

Sir John Reith where if they continued to cause any trouble they would not be heard by 

the establishment. An ironic result of this radio-phonic Gulag Archipelago was that BBC 

Manchester features became the centre for pioneering and innovative programmes which 

sought wider representation of the people of Britain. 

From the 1930s, the Features Department of the BBC existed alongside the Drama 

Department before they were eventually merged in 1967. The credit for exploring the 

unique dramatic potential of radio during the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s belongs to 

Features rather than to Drama under Lord John Gielgud’s brother Val which tended to 

concentrate on book dramatisations or adaptations of theatre productions. 

5



Early exponents of radio’s experimental sound potential were Lance Sieveking and 

Tyrone Guthrie. The radio feature sought to recreate real-life stories using radio drama 

techniques. The form attracted significant poets some of whom became staff writerproducers 

such as Louis MacNeice. 

Significant productions by Features which have been repeatedly cited by critics include D. 

G. Bridson’s The March of the ‘45 (1936) and MacNeice’s Christopher Columbus 

(1942). They resemble Elizabethan chronicle history plays in existing as both dramatised 

history and poetic drama, documentary and fiction. The Features Department also 

produced plays specifically written for radio which have become somewhat iconic. They 

include Louis MacNeice’s The Dark Tower (1946) and Dylan Thomas’s much revered 

Under Milk Wood (1954) that has become a standard text for English and Drama 

curriculum. The narrative performance by Richard Burton contributed to its success. It won 

the prestigious Prix Italia prize for radio fiction, has been made into a film and had many 

theatre presentations – the more recent in 1995 being presented on the Olivier stage of 

the Royal National Theatre. 

It would be right to ask the question why such successful works emanated from Features 

rather than Val Gielgud’s Radio Drama Department. It has been argued somewhat 

convincingly that Radio Drama tended to be hidebound by the conventions and codes of 

conventional theatre and dramatic narrative. Since the term ‘feature’ was so nebulous, 

producers and writers in this area of the BBC were in a better position to subvert 

production orthodoxy and discover and experiment with the potential of radio’s 

imaginative spectacle. They reflected the literary experiments in form advanced by James 

Joyce and the exploration of psychology and neuroses inherent in Franz Kafka’s work. 

There were attempts to assert the radiogenic rather than cinegenic. MacNeice sculpted 

his writing so that it carried the charge of a poetic, saga-like quest. Dylan Thomas used a 

traditional narrative framework to exquisitely celebrate the onomatopoetic riches of 

characterisation through voice. 

But it would be wrong to condemn the work of Radio Drama as pedestrian and ineffective. 

The high brow objectives of the BBC embraced a production of T S Elliott’s verse play 

‘Murder in the Cathedral’ which like Harold Pinter’s work of the 1960s probably worked 

6



better with the aural flexibility of the radio medium than the physical spatiality of stage 

theatre. 

Val Gielgud worked hard to develop specific radio performance skills. He formed a Radio 

Drama company of actors to be available to perform in BBC productions, but more 

importantly to specialise and develop in a new drama performance medium. He and his 

directors consolidated radio’s intrinsic techniques of texture and narrative. They found 

little difficulty expressing the equivalence of moving from long shot to close-up in sound by 

using the intimate space and closeness of microphone performance. Radio could enter 

the minds of characters much more readily than the visual media. 

The stage device of soliloquy and aside which sometimes appears clumsy and artificial in 

the modern proscenium-arch theatre found its natural environment in radio where the 

microphone can focus very naturally on the interior workings of consciousness. Intimate 

emotion and mental turmoil can communicate to the listener with ease. Gielgud realised 

that as the listener cannot see the actor speaking, the words seem to come straight from 

the mind, not the mouth. 

Tyrone Guthrie went on to establish his reputation in film and theatre. Indeed he founded 

the Stratford theatre festival in Canada. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he worked as a 

producer at the BBC. His career as a radio playwright was cut short by personality clashes 

with Gielgud which resulted in a form of ‘cultural black-listing’ which is not an uncommon 

factor in the under-representation of a considerable number of playwrights, authors and 

directors. His play ‘The Flowers Are Not for You to Pick’ (1930), demonstrated that 

cinematic methods of montage, cross-fading and representing past, present, future, inner 

and outer consciousness had a place in the sound medium. The play exploited radio’s 

novelistic ability to dramatise the inner lives of people. Guthrie’s play is all in the mind of 

its central character, who as a drowning man in the middle of an ocean is located 

realistically in a position unrealisable in the theatre, except in a highly stylised way. 

Guthrie conveyed the central character’s review of his entire life through a series of 

flashbacks and audio collage of memories flitting through rapid transitions of time and 

place. Lance Sieveking was busy pushing the radiophonic boundaries so that much of his 

work would never have worked on the stage. His ‘Kaleidoscope I’ broadcast in 1928 

7



represented a brave experiment in montaging speech and sound and its pace resembled 

the style of visual editing in cinema. Avant-garde auteurs such as Guthrie and Sieveking 

had to work with live performances and primitive monophonic technology. Scene changes 

and segueing could only be achieved by switching between studios. Magnetic tape, 

invented and developed by the Germans, was not available in radio production until the 

middle to late 1950s. 

The major cultural issue concerning radio drama in Britain in the 20th century is why it 

took so long for the BBC to introduce popular series and serials. The concept of the radio 

soap opera was invented by the Americans, developed by the Australians and Latin 

Americans with huge success. Britain’s earliest soap, ‘The Robinsons’ first appeared 

during the Second World War. It was an import and not a home grown and tried 

programming product. Canadian comedy writer Alan Melville was directed to devise a 

radio soap to be broadcast to the United States and Canada on the BBC’s North 

American Service with the political objective of demonstrating British pluck, courage and 

resistance to Hitler, the Luftwaffe and the Blitz. Its first title was ‘Front Line Family’ and it 

showed the Robinson family bravely coping with rationing, bombs, their RAF aircrew son 

going missing, their daughter Kay falling in and out of love. It was a hit in North America. 

Other overseas services started to broadcast it and servicemen on leave and dial 

twiddling Brits were finding it as a welcome alternative to Lord Law-Haw. Dulcie Gray who 

played the Robinsons’ daughter in law said everyone knew that the drama was politically 

motivated: 

‘ It was classed as propaganda and we knew the aim was to get the Americans into the war. I 

was very committed. My mother had been killed by the Japanese, my brother was a prisoner of 

war. My husband was serving in Northern Ireland. Practically everybody we knew was affected 

by the war in some way. Almost immediately, we got a tremendous number of letters from 

people in America and all over the Empire. They seemed really moved by the stories. I can’t 

claim we were solely responsible for bringing in the Americans and winning the war, but I feel 

our little soap opera helped.’ 

Throughout the 1930s Val Gielgud had prevented the development of a BBC radio soap. 

He considered it vulgar and a bastard form of drama from the USA. While the Front Line 

Family was renamed ‘The Robinsons’ and became a huge success on the Home 

Service, Gielgud issued a directive to members of the BBC Repertory Company that 

working in a radio soap would be a breach of contract. The Robinsons ran for six years 

8



until 1948 and outlasted the war. It does seem extraordinary that the prejudice, pomposity 

and elitist discrimination of one man can be responsible for holding back the tide of one of 

the most significant radio programming forms this century. But Gielgud’s belief that soap 

opera was cheap and nasty was echoed by the BBC’s senior management. 

The BBC did not need soap operas to survive. There was no competition. The Robinsons 

mutated as a result of broadcasting becoming an informational propagandist weapon. The 

audience popularity for dramatic story telling in the soap opera form was a benign and 

accidental side effect. Gielgud’s vituperative and implacable opposition to soaps could be 

divided into the following arguments: 

F) If an actor became a household name in a soap opera he would end up demanding 

more money until he was being paid as much as the most distinguished repertory 

thespians. 

G) Serial actors were not in the classical thespian league. 

H) The soap opera was ‘deliberately constructed to hit the very centre of the domestic 

hearth by playing variations on the theme of all kinds of domestic trivia. 

I) The British public would not like it because they would realise that soaps are capable of 

achieving a quite unreasonable influence. 

But it would be wrong to condemn Gielgud’s contribution to broadcasting on the basis of 

his elitist attitude to popular drama. It can also be argued that his commitment to high 

cultural standards established a more qualitative tradition of writing, direction, production 

and performance in Britain. The Second World War accelerated changes and accentuated 

the need for thoughtful and moral enhancing drama. Production expanded. The number of 

plays and special series increased. There is also evidence that British radio drama sought 

to challenge the venom of anti-Semitism on at least one occasion. 

Gielgud commissioned and produced In The Shadow Of The Swastika which starred 

Marius Goring in the role of Adolf Hitler. The plot and production offered a humanist 

challenge to the prejudice engendered by Nazi ideology. The series’ strength lay in its 

use of irony and avoidance of didactic or propagandist explicitness. The drama explored 

the fate of a Hitler Youth girl whose life is saved by a Jewish surgeon in Berlin. As she 

drifts into semi-consciousness during anaesthesia she repeatedly mumbles ‘kill the 

Jews’ which is overheard by the Jewish doctor who is the only person capable of keeping 

her alive. He does not flinch from his Hippocratic oath. 

9



The BBC establishment, British Ministry of Information, were very uncomfortable 

confronting the vista of anti-Semitism and no further broadcasts of this serial were 

permitted and no more productions like it were ever commissioned during the course of 

the war. BBC Radio Drama challenged German dramatic propaganda by adopting an 

approach to classical stories and plays which allegorically and metaphorically symbolised 

Britain’s struggle to win the war and defeat ‘the dark forces of evil’. Dorothy L Sayer’s 

dramatisation of the life of Christ, The Man Born To Be King, is an example of this genre. 

The series, directed and produced by Val Gielgud, echoed the turbulent conflict in which 

the world was then embroiled. 

Radio drama expression has been very much a reflection of the politico-economic story of 

the twentieth century. Freedom of expression was fiercely controlled in the totalitarian 

regimes that sought to influence and control the thinking and beliefs of citizens. The 

broadcast environment here was state controlled. Radio drama was utilised for 

propaganda purposes. Intelligent and cunning dictators realised that propaganda worked 

if it was entertaining and floated within a well told story. Nazi Germany used skilful 

mixtures of popular music and drama to psychologically intimidate Allied troops and 

civilian populations. They were sometimes aided by American and British fascists who 

preferred to fight the war in Berlin, rather than London or New York. The American 

academic Frederick Wilhelm Kaltenbach used dramatic scripts in overseas English 

broadcasts to attack the British position in the war. He translated a radio play by Erwin 

Barth von Wehrenalp called ‘Lightning Action’ to celebrate the German victory in 

Norway. Twelve scenes were recorded on 5th April 1941 and the cast included the British 

film actor Jack Trevor and other ex-patriots. He also satirised Roosevelt’s Lease-Lend Bill 

with a series of dramatic talks called ‘British Disregard for American Rights’. 

The German actress Gertrud Hahn presented a series ‘Hot Off The Wire’ where she 

played the role of a switchboard operator at the Pittsburgh Tribune reading letters from the 

paper’s Berlin correspondent ‘Joe ’. In his letters Joe eulogised Nazi achievements and 

condemned the newspaper’s editors who were given Jewish names: ‘Rosenbloom and 

Finelstein’. He said they ‘change his wires round and won’t tell the truth about 

Germany.’ Another very influential American-German academic Otto Koischwitz 

originated a series called ‘Dr Anders and Little Margaret’ where the character Little 

10



Margaret was an American girl who had come to Germany to see her grandmother and 

found a delightful daily routine of sumptuous meals, plays, songs and general happiness. 

In May 1944 Koischwitz wrote a doomsday radio play for the D-Day invasion forces and 

their families at home which was broadcast by short-wave to the United States. The 

actress Mildred Gillars played the part of a GI’s mother who in a tear-stained monologue 

predicted disaster and grief: 

‘ Everybody says the invasion is suicide. The simplest person knows that between seventy and 

ninety per cent of the boys will be killed, or crippled for the rest of their lives!’ 

The influence of Gielgud and dictatorial Director-Generals such as John Reith and more 

recently John Birt raises the issue of ownership versus control and ‘professionalism’ 

within a radio broadcasting culture. In a sense the shareholders of the BBC are the 

licence-payers but it is arguable whether they have any direct control or influence over day 

to day and yearly management of the corporation. 

Strategy is certainly not directed by licence-payers. The BBC is only obliged to produce a 

private company audit to Parliament rather than the more rigorous reporting demanded of 

local authorities by the Audit Commission. The BBC engages in ‘audience consultation’ 

campaigns but these have often been criticised for being palliatives and gestural. In reality 

licence-payers are powerless in relation to BBC decision making. BBC managers and 

Director-Generals are unique in having allocative as well as operational control. The 

analysis of the history of Reith’s control over staffing culture and programming content 

suggests that there have been and continue to be powerful conflicts between the skills 

and expertise of professional values to which BBC radio programme making personnel 

aspire and the ideological intentions, political aspirations and cultural imperatives of senior 

management. 

In 1977 the academic writer Tom Burns conducted three hundred interviews with BBC 

staff and detected a cult of the professional where references on quality, motivation and 

objectives had more to do with peer approval and impression. He found that three 

imperatives were often in conflict with one another. They were: 

1. Reithian view of public service and responsibility to the licence-payer. 

2. Referring to fellow professional standards – the cult of the professional. 

11



3. Audience ratings as a measurement of judging the success or failure of the 

programme. 

During Reith’s period of stewardship the first imperative was predominant. Under Sir John 

Birt, the third and then second imperatives would appear to be the priorities on the basis 

of interviews with BBC radio drama directors past and present. 

The post Second World War period has been a particularly rich one for British radio 

drama, although in recent years the insecurity engendered by the digitised and multimedia 

age has meant that it has become a casualty of fashion and the BBC’s ventures into 

digital and Internet communications. 

The soap opera not only survived but expanded. Drama director Val Gielgud allowed Mrs 

Dale’s Diary to fill the vacuum left by the Robinsons. Hilary Kingsley speculated that 

Gielgud was probably persuaded that the nice middle-class doctor’s wife Mrs Dale was 

not really a soap person. A BBC document reveals that they thought Mrs Dale’s Diary 

was ‘not a soap opera of the kind which abounds in American radio.’ Mrs Dale outlasted 

Val Gielgud and had a twenty one year run between January 1948 and April 1969 where 

its popularity after 5,531 episodes was such that Liberal MP Peter Bessell tried to 

introduce a parliamentary reprieve. 

Dick Barton – Special Agent captivated the imagination and spirit of adventure during the 

post war rationing period. The Department of Agriculture’s desire to improve farming 

efficiency and the demand by listeners at a public meeting in Birmingham for a rural Dick 

Barton led to the creation of ‘The Archers’ which has become the world’s longest and 

most successful soap. It still commands the highest audiences on the BBC Radio flagship, 

Radio Four. It had a slow and somewhat conservative approach to responding to 

changing social mores and the changing nature of British society. It was about twenty 

years before it recognised the presence of a substantial Asian community in the Midlands. 

The ‘Usher’ character then became something of a cliché for presenting every kind of 

racial issue that had been neglected up until her introduction in the story. 

‘ Waggoners Walk’ which started on BBC Radio 2 in April 1969 sought to capture the 

tensions of student protest, sexual equality, contraception and a more socially mobile 

society. It was a product of the ‘swinging sixties’ ‘rebellious youth culture’, ‘the 

12



Beatles’ and fall out from student protests against Britain’s support for America in 

Vietnam. It featured three young women, Tracey, Lynn and Barbara sharing a flat in 

Hampstead. One had an illegitimate child and married a homosexual (who later 

‘reformed’), another’s marriage broke up and the third lived in sin. Waggoner’s Walk 

threw itself into social problems such as abortion, child custody, hypothermia, murder, and 

confrontations of every kind. By 1974 it had an audience of four million listeners which 

was much higher than the Archers. There was even a competition so that listeners could 

write their own plots. The suggestion that the whole cast board a bus which was then 

driven over the edge of a cliff was somewhat portentous because the series was axed in 

June 1980 as part of a money-saving plan. 

At a time when television now commanded the centre of attention in terms of domestic 

entertainment, it could be argued that liquidating such a popular story telling form in radio 

was another example of the BBC cutting off its nose to spite its face. New attempts to 

launch soap operas on the radio by the BBC have been heroic failures. They include 

‘Citizens’ which tried hard to be a radio ‘Eastenders’ but failed to be eclectic in its 

audience objectives, lacked a community cohesion in plot and tried to be too worthy with 

contemporary issues at the expense of basic dramatic values. The origination of new BBC 

soaps has been the preserve of the BBC World Service where the objective has been to 

promote an image of a new multi-cultural Britain. Other motives have been to ‘help third 

world countries’ devise popular soaps that promulgate social action and education. 

Exports of the British radio soap opera tradition have taken root in Moscow where Prime 

Minister Tony Blair was persuaded to play a cameo role on a visit to Russia, Afghanistan, 

and parts of Africa. 

The post war establishment of the Third Programme, later becoming Radio Three 

provided a platform for more abstract and experimental explorations of the audio drama 

story telling form. Combined with the scope and soundscape for popular and challenging 

writing on the Home Service, later to become Radio Four, BBC Radio Drama enjoyed 

something of a golden age during the 50s 60s and 70s. Indeed the inauguration of 

Independent television in 1955 was upstaged and overshadowed by the death of Grace 

Archer in a dramatic episode of the Archers on the Home Service. 

13



In this period British radio drama developed confidence in its exceptional and intrinsic 

characteristics: 

A) Narration was employed more fully in radio communication. It has not been a popular 

story telling device in cinema and was rather rare in Western theatre. It borrowed from 

the tradition of the Chorus in Greek tragedy and Brecht’s pioneering work with Berliner 

Ensemble who was introduced to Britain along with Samuel Beckett through theatre 

clubs and the enthusiastic critical evangelism of Martin Esslin and Kenneth Tynan. 

B) Narration marked the natural and elegant symbiosis between radio playwriting and 

literary prose. Its power is directly linked to the ability of radio to render the speaker 

invisible. 

C) The logic of narrative voice in radio drama stimulated a diametric rebellion by avantgarde 

and experimental writers who derived their inspiration from the absurdists. 

Samuel Beckett’s ‘All That Fall’ directed by Donald McWinnie in 1957 is an example 

of this. The need to establish notions of realistic sound as symbols gave birth to the 

BBC radiophonic workshop. 

D) Narration as a story telling concept was explored in unique ways such as ‘Under Milk 

Wood’ where it functioned as a verbal camera. The Greek choral narrative structure in 

independent radio’s dramatisation of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ in 1990 

was another example of radio narration serving the purpose of verbal camera. 

E) The narrative long shot in radio could establish with a few words and within a few 

seconds a fictional reality that would be financially prohibitive in any other medium. 

F) The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in 1978 which was produced by the Light 

Entertainment department acquired cult status and had been substantially constructed 

by the writer Douglas Adams through narrative framework and imagery which was as 

rich and imaginative as any cinematic science fiction blockbuster such as 2001 or the 

Star Wars Trilogy. 

G)The production challenge of establishing the world of self-parodying cosmic fantasy, 

weird life forms, time warps, a major character with two heads, visits to bizarre planets, 

interactive and loquacious computers became an opportunity in the radio medium. The 

transfer to television was a failure. Imaginative stimulation on the radio turned out to be 

tacky and unrewarding in a modestly budgeted studio based drama shot on video. 

F) In radio drama fantastic and symbolic worlds with characters and creatures never 

visually realised found their home. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels transferred 

into audio dramatisation with energy and verve during the 1980s. It can be argued that 

Henry Reed’s 1947 radio adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was more 

effective than the John Huston film that struggled to transform the novel’s allegorical 

texture into special effects and superficial representations of reality. 

G) Radio drama could give life to inanimate objects and it could be argued that a 

postmodernist tradition took root in the work of Don Haworth whose 1975 play ‘On a 

Day in a Garden in Summer’ was populated with vocalised ‘characters’ who were in 

14



fact plants. A 1998 BBC radio drama production anthropomorphised two goldfish with 

cognition and imagination. (The Goldfish Bowl by Shaun Prendergast). 

H) Radio Drama was a natural home for Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy, where 

ghostly apparitions resonate fully with the listener’s imagination so that Hamlet’s 

father and Banquo are I: The century’s progress in psychiatry, psycho-analysis, 

psychology and psycho-pathology find in radio drama the most flexible medium of 

expression. What better space than the theatre of the mind? Louis MacNeice’s 

adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Waves’ which requires the expression of six 

disembodied consciousnesses belonged in radio rather than film, television or theatre. 

The composer John Cage created ‘Roaratoria – An Irish Circus’ out of James 

Joyce’s ‘Finnegan’s Wake.’ 

So the post war period fostered the recognition and development of leading playwrights in 

a modest and growingly self-confident milieu. Samuel Beckett produced a canon of radio 

plays for the BBC which are substantial contributions to his cultural value as a writer. His 

respect for the medium is such that he left a codicil in his will preventing the stage 

adaptation of his radio texts. 

Tom Stoppard’s successful and significant stage play, Indian Ink, was conceived and first 

produced as the radio play In the Native State. I am prepared to argue that John 

Tydeman’s radio direction was better than any stage presentation of the text. Britain’s 

foremost living woman stage playwright is Caryl Churchill. But the majority of her first 

experiences with professional drama production were as a radio playwright. There were 

nine productions with BBC radio drama up until 1973 when her stage work began to be 

recognised at the Royal Court Theatre. Hanif Kureishi, regarded as one of Britain’s 

leading Asian writers, famous for his film My Beautiful Launderette and his novel The 

Buddha of Suburbia was first produced in radio. Tom Stoppard’s first professional 

production was in the fifteen minute Just Before Midnight slot on BBC Radio which 

showcased new dramatists. Joe Orton was discovered by radio drama and first produced 

in this slot. 

In 1963 BBC radio director, John Tydeman, advised rewrites and a change of title and The 

Ruffian On The Stair became Orton’s dramatic debut. John Tydeman also read one of his 

stage scripts, Entertaining Mr Sloane, and suggested he send it to the influential agent 

Peggy Ramsey who confirmed that he was a writer of outstanding promise, and married 

the script with theatre producer Michael Codron. The play rapidly snowballed into a West 

End success. Sue Townsend, Harold Pinter, Alan Ayckbourn, Alan Plater, Anthony 

15



Minghella, Angela Carter, Alan Bleasdale, Willy Russell and Louis MacNeice are a few 

other literary luminaries whose roots were planted in radio drama. Ayckbourn worked with 

the legendary radio drama director Alfred Bradley in Leeds. Giles Cooper, who is better 

known for his radio plays, started as a radio actor. Robert Bolt learned the craft of writing 

by producing scripts for Children’s Hour. The radio productions in 1960 of Harold Pinter’s 

two short plays, A Slight Ache and A Night Out, are credited with creating the favourable 

critical climate for his first major stage success, The Caretaker. 

Several critics have argued that radio is the natural home for the theatre of the absurd, 

and there was something approaching a revolution in radio drama between the mid-1950s 

and the mid-1960s, with Giles Cooper, Samuel Beckett, Rhys Adrian, Frederick Bradnum, 

Harold Pinter, James Saunders, Barry Bermange, Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard. 

It is now clear that the early exponents of original writing for radio felt compelled to 

compensate for its blindness by celebrating rich verbal textures and colours for the ear. 

Dylan Thomas’s ‘Under Milk Wood’ is an obvious example of this achievement. The 

new generation of writers engaging the absurdist tradition employed minimalist styles of 

dialogue and the power of subtext in language to stimulate the imagination of the radio 

drama listener. Original radio plays of exceptional stature have bridged the ‘Look Back In 

Anger’ generation with the present day. They include David Rudkin’s Cries from 

Casement As His Bones Are Brought to Dublin (1973) and John Arden’s Pearl (1978), 

Robert Ferguson’s Transfigured Night (1984) and Howard Barker’s Scenes from an 

Execution (1984) and Anthony Minghella’s Cigarettes and Chocolate. (1988). 

One of the paradoxes of radio drama is that highly accomplished and revered writers who 

have chosen to specialise in this field remain locked in a cabinet of obscurity. Rhys Adrian 

died in 1990 having written 32 plays for radio, all of which had been broadcast. Their 

literary quality is marked by the fact that most were broadcast on the Third Programme 

and then Radio Three. This is the BBC’s cultural channel which is stamped with the 

kudos of intelligentsia approval. John Tydeman directed 27 of them. Adrian received 

several awards, yet a writer whose drama ‘reflected a questioning mind and a sensitive 

ear for the agony and laughter of ordinary lives’ has no mainstream cultural resonance. 

The same can be said of Giles Cooper who in the late 1950s and early 60s had a didactic 

force which paralleled the desire to recognise new voices and directions in British theatre. 

16



He cultivated the art of dramatically counterpointing the exterior and the interior of 

characters who felt themselves ‘trapped in the contemporary machinery of modern life 

and who were unable to escape’. 

Cooper wrote over sixty scripts for BBC Radio. His 1957 play The Disagreeable Oyster, 

along with the production of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall were fundamental in creating 

the need for a permanent sound workshop to create aural images based on effects and 

abstract musical rhythms. The BBC’s annual radio drama writing awards were named 

after him and his radio script Unman, Wittering and Zigo was made into a film starring 

David Hemmings. Yet he could never be said to be a household name. If you cared to 

mention his name within earshot of a contemporary cultural crowd, you might be greeted 

with the withering question “Who?” 

John Mortimer in his autobiography Clinging To The Wreckage describes how the BBC 

radio drama director Nesta Pain repeatedly badgered him into writing his first radio play, 

Dock Brief. He says the experience was ‘to his lasting benefit’. She elicited a rewrite of 

the language for one of the central characters, and Mortimer realised he ‘was able to 

learn something of lasting value from a director’. Dock Brief became the catalyst for a 

meeting with theatre producer Michael Codron and launched his career as a playwright. 

John Mortimer’s son Jeremy has been at the heart of the BBC Radio Drama Department 

over the last two decades and has developed an international reputation as a dramaturge 

and director. He originated the national young writers’ festivals which have ushered in a 

new generation of writers and opportunities for multi-cultural expression and 

representation. 

Economic instability and the political pressure to reduce public expenditure presents 

hazards of boom and bust fluctuations in investment and production. The radio drama 

production environment becomes insecure and inconsistent. The pre-requisite for public 

funding is sometimes predicated on how well state funded radio drama performs in 

comparison with the audience surveys of its commercial counterparts. BBC Radio Drama 

has been a casualty of these socio-economic dynamics. The play form for Radio Four has 

now been limited to one hour. The Script Unit has been abolished, the status of new 

writing downgraded, and bold and ‘dangerous’ plays have been ghettoised onto Radio 

Three which caters for the minority intelligentsia. John Tydeman’s outstanding direction 

17



and production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in 1993 was placed on Radio 

Three. Its two and a half hour length would not have been a discredit to Radio Four, which 

in 1995 studded its Sunday schedule with eight half hour sequences of a surround sound 

dramatisation of Len Deighton’s novel Bomber. Impressive productions of 

Shakespeare’s plays are rarely scheduled on Radio Four and now seem condemned to a 

form of elitist cloistering on the successor to the Third Programme. 

The pressures which liquidated the new dramatist’s television studio play in favour of 

filmed series and serials have been visited on Radio Drama. Economic ideology imported 

by the Director-General, John Birt, and multi-million pound surveys produced by outside 

management consultants, with audience focus groups have marginalised talented and 

experienced editors and producers such as John Tydeman, Martin Jenkins, Sean 

McLaughlin, Jane Morgan and Nigel Bryant. Children’s drama, or young story telling 

sequences have been liquidated. The first Radio Five Network between 1989 and 1994 

pioneered a ‘young in mind and young at heart’ approach to radio drama production. 

Editor Caroline Raphael introduced new writing and performing voices. The network 

became an alternative production base for writers and actors, but was then sacrificed on 

the altar of BBC programming politics. The network made way for a more successful 

twenty four hour news and sport channel. 

Caroline Raphael became the Radio Drama Department’s first woman editor and she has 

been followed by the award-winning and innovative Manchester director Kate Rowland. 

However, children’s drama has not survived as a regularly scheduled mainstay of BBC 

radio drama production and broadcast. A minority half hour Radio Four slot on Sunday 

evenings has not been preserved in the new controller’s scheduling changes which took 

effect in April 1998. It could be argued that the death of children’s drama on BBC radio is 

an astonishing failure of public broadcasting philosophy and is in marked contrast to the 

experience in the USA where independent production companies maintain successful 

series and broadcast projects on a wide range of station formats. 

Eva Stenman-Rotstein at the publicly funded Swedish Radio Broadcasting Corporation 

has steered a series of evolutionary changes to young people’s radio drama that has 

captured a new generation of listeners. Story-telling for children and young people has 

reinvented itself and ‘delivered’ audiences. 

18



A further development at the BBC in 1997 saw the Radio Drama Department losing its 

editorial independence and become a production server to network controllers and 

commissioning editors whose decisions depend on the expectation of audience building 

and satisfaction. BBC World Service radio drama has lost its brilliant autonomous 

production culture. The devaluing of the licence fee has reduced the budgets and 

consequently the scope for diversity and scale of production. The suffocating market 

bureaucracy of ‘Producer Choice’ has meant that the BBC’s radio drama directors / 

producers have to show due consideration for paying for the cost of even one editing razor 

blade. The same amount of paper work is expended in the ordering of an item of 

equipment costing one pound as commissioning an established writer to produce a script 

for five thousand pounds. The Radio Drama repertory company of actors diminished from 

about 30 in the early 1980s to only 6 in 1999. When a pressure group and academics 

sought to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the broadcast of ‘The Comedy of Danger’ 

actors and producers said they feared for the future of radio drama. The Giles Cooper 

Awards set up to recognise new writing in radio drama were deleted. 

It would appear that ‘professional autonomy’ in radio drama production at the BBC is 

facing its greatest intensity of constraints and pressures. Between 1995 and the year 2000 

BBC radio production and broadcast has undergone radical changes in ‘institutional 

organisation’. Any initial occupational socialisation by staff has been rapidly re-aligned. 

This has resulted in compulsory and voluntary redundancies. Unlike Reith and successive 

Director-Generals it would appear that Sir John Birt has rewritten the aims and objectives 

of the institutional organisation. On the inside market economic imperatives and 

catastrophic management and technology changes. On the outside the BBC’s public 

service remit remains, but Parliament is being asked to increase the BBC’s room for 

manoeuvre in commercial and global fields and to enjoy complete autonomy with regard 

to the changes to the institutional organisation. 

The only regulatory constraints have been to account for policy, actions and complaints 

before the House of Commons committee on Media, Culture and Sport. The Office of Fair 

Trading has sought to prevent a non-competitive cartel operating in television independent 

production where there has been a statutory threshold of 25% of output. The obligation in 

the context of national radio networks was 10% and only voluntary. 

19



The economic constraints have been increases in inflation and operating costs beyond the 

proportionate increase in licence fee income, the risk of licence fee non-payment, and the 

need to divert existing programming budgets for radio and television to support a 17 

million pound investment in Internet media and digital/satellite channel projects such as 

the twenty four hour news channel ‘News 24’. 

One strategy for maintaining professional autonomy in BBC radio drama production has 

been the move to ensure corroboration and confirmation of ‘cultural creativity’. This is 

the recognition of artistic merit through awards and independent critical coverage. It is 

postulated that the reputation generated by such accolades protect the artist/professionals 

from the oppressive constraints of institutional organisation. Unfortunately a new trend is 

emerging to disturb the certainty of the ‘cultural creativity’ factor. There is evidence that 

the BBC realises that public opinion and Parliamentary approval for the BBC’s licence fee 

depends on winning cultural celebration and approval, primarily within the UK. At what 

price and at what cost will the BBC ensure that it wins the major prizes? The advantage of 

this imperative is that the BBC is constrained to support professional infrastructures of 

production which can consistently achieve recognition for cultural creativity. 

It is problematic when the BBC controls the mechanism for cultural recognition and 

manipulates the parameters for selecting ‘cultural creative achievement’. For the edition 

of 11th to 17th July 1998 the Radio Times, the largest selling magazine in Britain and with 

the BBC as the major shareholder, decided to invite its readers to ‘vote for your all-time 

greats’. It explained that: ‘As there are so many memorable programmes and people to 

choose from, we asked a panel of experts to help you decide by nominating what they 

have enjoyed most’. The magazine explained that anyone was open to ‘disagree with 

their suggestions, just add your own’. People sending in their votes were automatically 

entered for a competition to win a widescreen television. Here was an example of the BBC 

through its powerful Radio Times gathering together the ‘great and good’ of 

broadcasting to identify the ‘best radio drama’ in Britain produced and broadcast over 

the previous 75 years. Not surprisingly all the nominated productions had been made by 

the BBC. One of the panel, Paul Donovan, was to later declare in his Sunday Times 

newspaper column that the BBC had had virtually no competition in radio drama. Eight of 

the nominated productions were titles in the BBC’s Radio Collection of audio cassettes 

20



which had a majority share of the spoken word market. The promotion therefore had a 

hidden commercial purpose and resonance masquerading as a cultural creative 

celebration and appreciation. 

The productions selected were: 

• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1989 starring Clive Merrison and Michael 

Williams.) 

• The Archers (first national broadcast 1951) 

• Bomber (1995, starring Sam West) 

• Cigarettes and Chocolate (1988, starring Juliet Stevenson and Bill Nighy) 

• Jude the Obscure (1986, starring Michael Pennington) 

• Lord of the Rings (1986, starring Ian Holm and Michael Horden) 

• Spoonface Steinberg (1997, starring Becky Simpson) 

• A Tale of Two Cities (1989, starring Charles Dance) 

• Under Milk Wood (1954, starring Richard Burton and Rachel Roberts)’ 

It is not clear that all members of the panel were involved in the selection of the radio 

drama nominees, but only 10 out of the 27 ‘experts’ had any professional or critical 

experience of radio. None were radio drama directors or producers. Only two had had any 

experience of writing radio drama and one of those specialised in comedy sketch writing. 

No one from independent radio, which by this time commanded the majority share of UK 

listening, was invited to join the panel. Despite the presence of the screenwriter and 

playwright Alan Plater as a member of the panel, the Radio Times feature on the 

competition omitted any mention of the authors or writers of the productions nominated. 

The artists associated with each production were the ‘stars’ in stage, screen or 

television. This assertion of the ‘star ’ or performer in the hierarchy of importance 

suggests a down-grading of the writer which had been a feature of the film world and 

television. As Hortense Powdermaker had stated in her anthropological investigation of 

‘Hollywood, The Dream Factory’: 

‘ From a business point of view, there are many advantages in the star system. The star has 

tangible features which can be advertised and marketed – a face, a body, a pair of legs, a voice, 

a certain kind of personality, real or synthetic – and can be typed as the wicked villain, the 

honest hero, the fatal siren, the sweet young girl, the neurotic woman...Here is a standardised 

21



product which they can understand, which can be advertised and sold, and which not only they, 

but also banks and exhibitors, regard as insurance for large profits.’ 

The Radio Times had decided that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Len Deighton, Anthony 

Minghella, Thomas Hardy, Tolkien, Lee Hall, Charles Dickens and Dylan Thomas were not 

important enough to identify. 

It may well be premature to mark the recent changes at the BBC as the start of a 

snowballing decline of BBC radio drama and the potential extinction of a great tradition. 

On the 27th of January 1997, BBC Radio Four transmitted a rather simple monologue by 

Lee Hall performed by the young actress Becky Simpson. The single voiced narrative was 

interspersed with the simple adroitness of operatic extracts sung by Maria Callas. 

Spoonface Steinberg was part of a series called God’s Country, but the charming, 

moving and truthful expression of a 7 year old character who was affectionately known as 

‘Spoonface’ because of the shape of her face touched every adult’s protective parental 

instinct and resonated the cruelty of death through the injustice of the child’s agony. 

Spoonface is seven years old, Jewish, autistic, very bright – and terminally ill with cancer. 

The character presents a dimension of natural courage which we would all wish to find 

and the depiction of the heroic role in a character so young is in itself a brave step in the 

genre of dramatic writing. It is the doctor who introduces Spoonface to the passion of 

opera and she is able to apply her homespun philosophy to the divas who complete their 

performances with spectacular stage deaths. 

It was a rare event indeed for a BBC radio production to stimulate the receipt of hundreds 

of letters and phone-calls. The one hour production was immediately introduced in 

bookshops as part of the BBC’s Radio cassette Collection and has become a best-seller. 

The marketing of the anonymous quotation: ‘This was the most poignant piece of radio I 

have heard for years. I am a truck driver and was in tears’ may be apocryphal, but the 

response of Gillian Reynolds in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Hall ’s writing is funny, intense and 

poetic’, Paul Donovan in the Sunday Times ‘Inevitably harrowing but also blackly funny’ 

and Sue Arnold in the Observer ‘Magnificently performed by 10 year old Becky Simpson’ 

were real enough. It is most unusual for the commercial arm of the BBC, BBC Worldwide, 

to find a commercial benefit from marketing an original play by a relatively obscure new 

writer. 

22



A more challenging concept in the audio-drama genre is where improvised or scripted live 

performance interacts with contexts of reality. This type of storytelling has a satirical or 

entertainment purpose and often involves duping people with impersonations and 

delivering a hoax frame of narrative for the listener. Chris Morris whose series ‘Blue Jam’ 

in the early hours of the morning on BBC Radio One has developed the role of a 

contemporary ‘dissident bard’. The humour and improvisation is socially and politically 

satirical as well as demonstrating postmodernist styles of ambient sound texture and 

dislocated and disrupted narrative direction. 

Radio as a source of communication has never lost its importance and value. Radio 

storytelling is in a continual state of creative flux with the invention of new form and 

content. I think a common story in most cultures is that the development of television 

offered fame and financial reward for the creative intelligentsia. The stampede from radio 

to television was often driven by market forces, but television’s status as the pre-eminent 

media form is under threat from Multimedia. Audiences have now been empowered with 

visual, text and sound interactivity and radio drama sits much more comfortably than film 

or television in this environment. Radio is much more efficient as a medium of 

communication. Its audience can continue to physically move and perform transport, 

recreational and employment tasks. Unlike the visual media radio can laterally shift across 

the range of human activities as a direct source of media consumption. The mind’s eye is 

a continually playing movie for the imagination while text, video, film and still pictures are 

scanned stereoscopically in the physical dimension. Experimental one and two minute 

radio plays can now be accessed on an American web site. Britain’s Independent Radio 

Drama Productions has introduced full length Internet Plays of the Month. 

Since 1987 radio drama has found a niche in UK independent radio which has secured 

state and private sponsorship, the support of audiences and the programme controllers of 

commercial talk and music formats. Two new writing schemes outside the BBC have been 

centred in the radio drama genre and provided professional writing opportunities for new 

writers over a ten year period. The distinguished writer and arts broadcaster Melvyn Bragg 

has gone so far as to say that the national young playwrights’ scheme for writers in 

commercial radio has become the most important new writing institution for young people 

in the country. The other scheme has persuaded the government arts funding body for 

23



London to recognise that radio drama has a legitimate place in the state subsidy of artistic 

and dramatic work. IRDP at LBC have pioneered the use of radio drama to stimulate and 

determine the content of live phone-in programming. The regular scheduling of five and 

ten minute drama series and the exploration of the symbiotic transfer of a script’s 

production between radio and theatre are further landmarks of development. 

The same period has also seen the maturing of an international spoken word market so 

that the ‘talking book’, ‘sound drama’ or ‘sound dramatisation’ is fighting for equal 

space on the shelves with traditional books. Radio drama’s ephemeral status as an art 

form is at an end. The performance of a dramatic script is now no longer existing in the 

fleeting moment of a live stage event. It is being captured on cassette, compact disc, 

computer file and other means of storage for replay. Some forms of sound story telling are 

equal to film videos in their availability and the permanence of access for future 

consumption. Multimedia and the Internet offer exciting dimensions to sound drama 

production and storytelling. The radio dramatist has been liberated from the dimension of 

short-lived terrestrial sound broadcasts. 

The Digital Audio medium is set to be the beginning of the first national broadcast 

competition for BBC radio in the field of radio plays, readings and comedy. The UK Radio 

Authority awarded DigitalOne the licence for Britain’s first DAB multiplex. DigitalOne 

which is owned by the country’s largest radio group GWR was the only applicant. In 

January 1999 it advertised for interest in tendering for a mono channel to broadcast a 

predominantly speech based service of serialised plays, books and comedy programmes 

for 13 hours a day. It has emerged that the mono frequency had the capacity to be 

changed into stereo. 

Britain’s status as the world’s leading producer of radio drama can now be accounted for 

with the following conclusions: 

1. A monopoly, political stability, and sustained continuity of public funding through the 

licence fee. and openness; on the other, the BBC’s monopoly in nationwide 

broadcasting as a public-service institution. 

2. Independent commercial radio has never been given a level playing field of 

competition. Through the 70s and early 80s a considerable range of qualitative radio 

drama projects were initiated and broadcast, but they were restricted to local radio 

24



transmission and the inception of right wing Thatcherite Conservative governments 

meant that independent broadcasting was reformed along market economic lines. 

3. Public sector broadcasting principles enshrined in earlier Broadcasting Acts were 

liquidated. The concept of ‘secondary rental’ whereby a proportion of station profits 

were taxed to be invested in training, engineering, and cultural programming was ended 

in 1990. The considerable development of radio drama by the London station LBC from 

1987 was frustrated by poor management of the station, its withdrawal of licence, 

restriction to Greater London broadcasting, and greater fragmentation of the London 

radio market. 

4. Although the Reithian doctrine of disseminating high culture could be condemned as 

elitist and patronising, the concentration of public funding in radio drama at the BBC 

militated towards standards of excellence. The post war commitment to provide popular 

entertainment as well helped consolidate an international reputation for innovation and 

imaginative programming. 

5. BBC Radio drama was effectively the first national theatre of the air. National BBC 

radio drama broadcasts could bring the theatre into people’s homes. It was a cohesive 

and cost effective method of guaranteeing democratic access to classical authors such 

as Shakespeare and Dickens. 

6. BBC radio drama also served as a window on the world for international writers and 

classical authors from alternative cultures. Millions of listeners who had no inclination to 

visit live theatre had an opportunity of listening to the Greek classical dramatists such 

as Sophocles and Aeschylus. Nigerian author Chinua Achebe was introduced to Britain 

through BBC radio dramatisation of his books ‘Things Fall Apart’ and ‘Anthills of 

Savannah’. 

7. Radio drama production is much more cost effective than television, film and theatre 

and reaches a much higher audience in direct proportion to its costs. 

How does the production of Radio Drama in Britain fit into the frame of capitalist 

production? The guaranteed funding by licence fee at the BBC meant that selection of 

‘product’ was done for primarily aesthetic reasons. The demand of cultural activity is that 

its material is freely chosen and preferably new. Radio had the luxury of being able to deal 

with old favourites which had become classics and embedded in examination syllabuses. 

This means that as a product the BBC had never been compelled to select and discard its 

radiophonic cultural products when novelty passed and obsolescence intervened. It has 

the advantage that cultural consumption resists the drive to sell more, lower the price, 

increase the profit, and introduce efficiencies into the economies of scale. The dynamo of 

capitalism was adjusted because public service considerations, the broadcasting 

monopoly and guaranteed licence fee income interrupted the cycle of purchase, 

obsolescence and replacement. 

25



But since 1995, the formula has changed. The introduction of pseudo-internal markets 

through producer choice means that economies of scale and the notion of ‘marginal 

profit’ are now as important as aesthetic and cultural imperatives. From 1998, Radio 

Drama’s main carrier Radio Four began to concentrate the process of commissioning on 

the basis of audience figures and research. The raison d’être was the same as in 

commercial radio. Programming selection depended on sustaining existing audience size, 

increasing ABC1 listeners, preventing loss of audience through ageing, and where 

possible achieving audience growth. BBC Radio was conscious of competition between its 

own networks. Editorial independence and commissioning power was taken away from 

the producers. All programming slots had to be ‘bid for’ by a selected panel of approved 

suppliers. Another important factor in any decision to commission has been the ability of a 

radio drama production to generate additional income through merchandising in the 

cassette, book, television, multimedia and video markets. Applying the capitalist dynamo 

has the effect of keeping innovative production as cheap as possible. 

The measured effects of this change in the economic equation of BBC radio drama 

production is that economies of scale have been reduced by trimediarisation – combining 

BBC drama production in radio, television and film into one unit. Innovation tends to be in 

the short form of programming content. Monologues and low cast productions have 

increased. The proportion of new writing and newly commissioned radio texts has 

declined vis-à-vis dramatised literature or adaptations of film and theatre scripts. This 

trend substantially reduces the costs of paying original writers and engaging producers 

with the dramaturgy of working with writers to develop an original script to completion and 

suitability for production. 

This work, and any part of it, is copyright. Putting any part of this work to any 

unauthorised use is a punishable offence and liable to prosecution. This applies in 

particular to reproduction, translation, copying, micro-filming, electronic storage or any 

other electronic re-working. 

26

British Radio Drama - European MediaCulture

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?