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The Alfred Bradley Bursary Award 2023 | Shortlist Announced

2023-07-11T11:16:00+00:00

Four writers have been shortlisted for the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award 2023 with the winner set to be announced in September.

The four writers and their shortlisted plays are:

No Man's Land by Benjamin Bee

Finn believes that his life sucks because he never had a dad (or any positive male role models). But when a friend convinces him to post an advert online he has to test that theory.

Mouth by Chrissy Jamieson Jones

Mouth is the story of two mothers who lie to protect themselves from loss. It asks the question: when your world is falling apart, what lengths would you go to in order to protect your family, but also yourself?

Has Anyone Seen Kelsey? by Julie Skeat

As her mum’s cancer quickly advances, a hapless young call centre worker faces grown-up life all on her own. In this blackly comic coming-of-age drama, Kelsey manages to completely botch her suicide, start planning her mum’s funeral and find an unlikely guardian angel, all in the space of a week.

Awaydays by Lee Thompson

Disillusioned with his life, sacked from his job, and drowning in family debt, a young man with seemingly nothing to lose decides to steal himself a better life, by helping his cousin rob the houses of wealthy footballers.

These shortlisted writers will now undertake a development process with mentorship from a ��̳ Audio Drama North Producer ready for the final judging process this Autumn.

The selected winner will be announced in September and awarded a £5,000 cash bursary and continue to develop their drama script to be broadcast on ��̳ Radio 4.

We wish everyone the best of luck and look forward to announcing the winner later this year.

Find out more about the writers below:

Benjamin Bee

BENJAMIN BEE was born in Newcastle, where he currently lives and works. A troubled childhood meant he left school aged 14 without any qualifications. Since then he’s graduated from the London Film School and became a multi-award-winning writer & director, whose short-form work has been long-listed twice for the BAFTA’s and screened at over 500 festivals worldwide.

In 2019 he was selected as a Screen International Star of Tomorrow, and is currently in development on his first feature, MARWELL, a touching, time-travel comedy-drama, without any time travel. Marwell was selected for Venice Biennale College–Cinema, EIFF Talent Lab Connects, and is in development with the BFI Film Fund.

Ben is also developing multiple projects for TV and was recently selected for the ��̳ Comedy Collective – designed to nurture the next generation of comedy talent. He proudly identifies as neurodivergent and disabled. Ben is represented by Hannah Linnen at 42 management.

Chrissy Jamieson Jones

Chrissy Jamieson Jones wrote her play MOUTH on the Liverpool Royal Court's Stage Write programme. She has previously been shortlisted for the Shelagh Delaney Award, and has had short plays produced in London and locally in the North West.

She is currently collaborating with Box of Tricks Theatre on their Pen Pals programme and juggles writing alongside being a mum and re-training to be a psychotherapist.

Julie Skeat

After twelve years in the education sector, Julie Skeat tired of writing in secret, left primary teaching and undertook Writing on the Wall’s Write to Work course. More than a reboot, it was a total reprogramming, giving her the injection of confidence needed to call herself a writer. Last summer she was chosen as one of the Writersroom Write Across Liverpool writers and wrote a pilot episode for her drama Pop! about her experience of burnout.

She is currently working on her first full length play as part of the Liverpool Everyman Playwrights’ Programme. In BURIED, a daughter reliving her mother’s escape from domestic abuse warns of the dangers of carrying someone else’s story. Julie’s characters aren’t used to the spotlight, tending to shuffle their feet and hang around in the margins. Many of these working-class voices think they are not worth listening to and she wants to prove them wrong.

Lee Thompson

LEE THOMPSON is a screenwriter and playwright from Liverpool. He is a graduate of the Liverpool Everyman Playwriting Course. His play QUALIFIED, a one-person show with music about teaching and mental health, has been performed at the Playhouse Studio in Liverpool and Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester. Lee has also written plays for the Everyman Youth Theatre and the Alligators Collective at The Royal Exchange Theatre Manchester.

For television, Lee worked on the final series of Jimmy McGovern’s MOVING ON, contributing the second episode of the series, SECRET LIFE. He is currently developing new work for television and stage. Lee is represented by Julia Mills at Berlin Associates.

Find out more about the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award including previous winners, great tips and advice on writing for Radio and read scripts in our online Script Library.

The Alfred Bradley Bursary Award 2023 - Useful Advice and Tips

2023-04-04T13:16:00+00:00

We ran an online event with previous Alfred Bradley Bursary Award winners Alex Clarke (2018/2019), Paul Jones (2021/2022), Emilie Robson (Special Commendation 2021/2022) and ��̳ Radio Drama North Producer, Gary Brown to discuss the bursary, the development process and what writers should think about when submitting their scripts.

The event was packed with useful advice for anyone interested in writing Audio Drama. Read edited highlights below.

Clockwise from top left: Usman Mullan (Development Producer, ��̳ Writersroom), Emilie Robson, Alex Clarke, Emily Demol (Development Coordinator, ��̳ Writersroom), Paul Jones and Gary Brown (Producer, ��̳ Audio Drama North).

Paul, Emilie and Alex - can you tell us a little bit about your writing careers and how much writing you'd actually done before you applied for the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award (ABBA)?

Paul Jones: I was writing fiction mainly. I'd kind of always written, but I didn't start to take it seriously until my forties, and then I always liked writing dialogue in particular. I had a couple of plays on, nothing major, you know, but I'd been stabbing away for a few years.

Alex Clarke: I had sort of come to writing sideways. I'd never really seen myself as a writer or that there was a career to be had. I was mainly either on the dole, cleaning or a support worker. I was moving around all these different working class jobs and writing was something that I was doing mainly for my own mental and wellbeing so, I’d kind of come to it through a mental health route.

It was something that I used to figure out my own problems and things that happened to me in the past, and it was very much a cathartic practice for me. It was never really something that I saw could even become a career. So I was probably writing for about 10 years for my own self and within different support groups that I was a member of.

Then I wrote a little piece about a crime that happened to me in my teens. I wrote this moment into a play and then sent it to the wonderful DYSPLA down in London. The team there work with dyslexic writers and autistic writers, and they thought there was something in it. So from there, I wrote little pieces of fringe theatre and then I decided I wanted to write television because my first love is television. I'm quite a visual person. I then entered the New Writing North screenwriting scheme and won it and went into development with Channel 4 with a piece that I’d written about childhood, autism and domestic violence.

As soon as that went into development, I was awarded the Alfred Bradley. At this point I’d been throwing a lot of things into the darkness with my writing and then within one year, 2 years, a lot of things kind of collided and came together for me.

Emilie Robson: Not an awful lot had been going on for me. I'd written a couple of plays with friends, and we put them on like a free fringe, but nothing professionally produced, nothing commissioned, and then I'd written a couple of solo things that I've gotten like shortlisted or long listed for prizes, but it was just always a bridesmaid situation.

In 2020 - what a great year that was! I threw everything at the wall with very little else to do and actually, just everything sort of started coming together, and ABBA was probably one of the first things that came through where I thought, ‘oh, my God!’ Like I was close to giving up. My script was long listed, shortlisted and then in the final 5. So I was basically a complete beginner and then it all started coming together.

Paul and Alex, what impact did winning the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award have on your writing career?

Alex: It changed everything, and I think it changed everything because it changed how I was viewing myself and my work, and that definitely came through the development process and working with Nadia Molinari (Audio Drama Producer) there in the team. Starting to see myself as potentially a professional writer, and that there was something important that I had to lend to the world of writing.

That's definitely something that I think is really unique to the process of writing for Radio. I've not found that process anywhere else. I got a BAFTA writing mentorship through it. I think the stamp of ��̳ and having a piece of work that been professionally made by the ��̳ was a beautiful calling card. It opened so many doors. The BAFTA writing mentorship were able to hear my writing and hear what I was able to do. From there, I got a BFI writing commission and I got an ITV mentorship, too. Then I also went into development with the ��̳ and Dancing Ledge with a new TV series that I’m developing and Dancing Ledge contacted me because they had seen that I'd won the Alfred Bradley so, yeah, it changed everything.

Paul Jones: I mean it's the pat on the back that you need, you know. I suppose like any writer it's difficult to call yourself a writer, isn't it? Most of the time you're squirreling away alone and for it to be recognised it gives you that little confidence boost you need. Makes it easier to get a meeting or perhaps get a second play if not commissioned, looked at.

Alex Clarke's winning submission, 'Waking Beauty' aired on ��̳ Radio 4 in March 2021.

Emilie, you received a special commendation with your ABBA submission - what happened next for you?

Emilie: I sometimes forget I didn't win! Because, I feel like – bar the money and the prestige - there was very little difference between my experience afterwards. It was a few months later, while I was in the middle of developing Pica for the ��̳ Writersroom’s Drama Room scheme that I got the message to say like we'd like to develop this for Radio 4 and I still got a full commission out of it.

That will still always be a highlight getting to do that when you kind of think ‘oh, second place, lovely. Thank you very much’. The process was just so much fun, even under COVID guidelines and restrictions. Then also because of the Alfred Bradley and the ��̳ having departments all across the UK, the Northern department were aware of who I was, and Alice Ramsey (Assistant Commissioner for Drama Commissioning and ��̳ Writersroom North) must have mentioned my name in like 10,000 rooms by now, and it's only from skimming the top of the Alfred Bradley that she even knows who I am to put me forward for these other opportunities. Still, I had a meeting last week where they said, ‘Alice Ramsey recommended you for this’.

So even when the commission's done, it still continues to sort of trickle and there's not really a limit to the impact it can have for you.

Gary, can you tell us a little bit about your role as an audio drama producer and how you work with writers?

Gary Brown: Audio is a writer's medium. Basically, when I get my budget, the biggest cost is the writer. So we can't do it without the writer. The words are everything. So we're here as Producers to facilitate the writer and ABBA is brilliant for bringing on new writers that maybe we wouldn't have been aware of. I mean, obviously, we've got our tendrils out trying to find writers, but ABBA is a great resource for us, and we’ve picked up lots of writers over the years. Everybody's probably seen that Lee Hall (Billy Elliot, War Horse), started with ABBA. A few years ago, we had Furquan Akhtar (The Bay, Wolfe) who's now a well-established TV writer.

My job is - I often work with established writers - but I also work with new writers and I guess the interesting thing is that it takes a year from idea to actual transmission. So we spend a long time with writers and that's the main joy of the job, because I basically take an idea that a writer’s come to me with and develop it over many drafts, and then get the joy of going into a studio with the actors, editing it and delivering it. So I go through all the processes. It's a really, really lovely job, but the writer is central.

I mentored Emilie last time for the Alfred Bradley, but she made my job really easy, because I got the script, and I thought, ‘Wow, there's not a lot I can do . I'm very happy with this.’ Sometimes you have to work quite intensively with the writer, but with Emilie I didn't have to work particularly hard, because I thought the script was excellent. Often, as with Emilie, it isn't just the winner of ABBA that gets produced, often the runners up do as well.

Emilie Robson's Alfred Bradley entry, 'Pica' aired on ��̳ Radio 4 in June 2022.

What should the writers be thinking about when writing an audio play, Gary? Is there anything that they should avoid?

Gary: Well, the most important thing is to listen to radio plays. You'd be surprised when you get some submissions, you think, ‘Gosh! Have you actually listened to a radio play recently?’ because they have changed from the old fashioned type.

The biggest mistake that writers new to radio make is that they think it's like a stage play and it isn't. I'm looking for filmic scripts and things that move along, that are very visual, and I don’t like too many plays with just people talking in a room. I like to think of big landscapes and big ideas. For me, it's a sort of hybrid between the film and the novel, because sometimes, if you want to, you can get inside the minds of your characters.

What I would say is, be bold. Go for really bold ideas. We're looking for original stuff. We're looking for, obviously your voice, but be bold. Go for a big idea.

Paul, Emilie and Alex - writers that come through ABBA are new to writing for Audio. What did you learn about writing for the Medium? And were there any surprises for any of you?

Emilie: I very much agree with Gary that actually there's so much in common with the novel and that internal world, that you won't get to see done successfully, probably in Film and TV, and that it looks really trite in Theatre. You actually have such artistic license within audio to get into that internal world. Also, what initially feel like limitations where you're like, ‘Oh, I can't show a facial expression, or I can't tell them what the boat looks like’, there's so much fun to be had in thinking, ‘Well, how do you do that then?’ Embrace the limitations, I would say, because actually there's so much fun to be had within that remit of sound.

Then there's absolutely no limitation to where it can go, because if you need to be in space - brilliant. You're just going to achieve it with a soundscape.

Paul: I treated it filmically, but once that was down, just being really mindful of all of the audio opportunities. Just little things like a bird's wings, or you know, a car in the distance. You’re then able to sort of see them into the story. It's probably helpful just to close your eyes and just to kind of go through it and discover audio possibilities that you wouldn't if you were just walking around.

It's really concentrated. I found that I really had to knuckle down in a different way, you know, and be very specific.

Alex: I think that what I learned was about that really lovely relationship between the listener and my words. It's almost like whispering into the imagination of the listener. It just became like this really lovely, intimate thing where you're not speaking to lots of people, you speak to this one specific person. That might be, I don't know, someone boxing things up somewhere, at work or on the bus to work or lying down in bed, just having a chill. Once I got my head around that relationship everything just became so much more easy and enjoyable for me than thinking that I had to speak to everybody. I was just speaking to this one specific listener.

It is so much like writing a novel, because when you're reading a novel, the images are coming to you, they’re specific to you and I just think that's like a special kind of magic that radio has too.

For the ABBA submission window we’re not only accepting scripts for Audio, but we’re also accepting TV, Film and Stage scripts as well and, if successful, those scripts will be taken forward for development.

With that in mind, Gary, what elements of those other mediums transfer well to audio, and which ones are perhaps better suited than others?

Gary: I think you can adapt most things to Audio. What I would say is, look at the structure. Look at fast storytelling. When I see a new script, I always look at how many scenes there are. If there's more than sort of 30 for a 45 minute play for example, I think, ‘Oh, good! This is going to be fast paced’.

Structure is everything with rising tension all the time. Every scene needs to lead up to the next one. So you want to go, ‘What happens next?’

Don't worry about set up in scenes. My advice to all writers is get in late and get out early. If you get people walking through doors at the beginning of the scene, it’s just unnecessary set up. Get to the meat of the scene. The great thing for TV writing and for radio writing is the 2 words at the end, which is ‘CUT TO’ because then you’ve got to the meat and you’re then off to the next scene.

Those first 10 pages that you are sending to us, those have got to be brilliant, the best that you can do, because basically if you don't hook us, the readers, in those first 10 pages, we’re going to move on. It's the same principles for any great storytelling.

Alex, can you just tell us a little bit about that process of developing your submitted script? Were there any significant changes when you got to the point of developing it for Radio 4?

Alex: There was a lot of changes, I mean the name changed (from 'Poundshop Vanilla Princess' to 'Waking Beauty'). That was one of the big ones. I think, like what Gary was saying - there was a story, and there was a seed, and there was potential because there was really good dialogue in what I'd sent in originally but the structure and the pace, and how we were going to tell this story was not really there. So I was working with Nadia Molinari (Audio Drama Producer), being mentored and getting the different drafts ready for the rest of the Alfred Bradley competition and throughout we were asking what is the best way of telling this story? Because you can tell one story a 1,000 different ways. But what's the best way to grab people's attention and keep their attention right through this 45 minutes because, the thing about radio as well as television is, you can turn over, find something else, flick through. We've got a plethora of stories out there.

It's not like theatre, because if you've paid £30 for a ticket, you’re going to stay till the end. It's the same with cinema as well. You know people are captive. So, unless it’s really bad, they're not going to get up and leave, but with radio they will. They will just go, ‘Oh, this isn't for me!’ They can do that so quickly.

So we went through many, many changes to try and get that pacing right and the vehicle for the story right. It's like pruning a rose brush. You start cutting things back so other things can grow and come to the front and that process is lovely and really nourishing.

As Paul was saying before, a lot of times it's you writing in a room on your own, so to be able to engage with somebody else who is curious and inquisitive about your work just helps you grow. So it was so valuable that period with Nadia.

And Paul, how was that process for you?

Paul: Yeah, it was terrific, actually, I was with - and I'm working now with Jessica Mitic in developing a second Audio Drama. It's just that kind of back and forth, and you know I'm always happy to take notes. I mean, I might not agree with them, and I might dismiss them. But for the most part it's a conversation, you know? I'm sure everybody sends their work to a friend to say, ‘Look, have a look at this, and tell me what you think. Is this terrible or not?’ But you need somebody to bounce work off. And so, being in that relationship with somebody who is invested in it, and not frightened of telling you that's something’s no good, or that needs work, I found that tremendously beneficial, and I'm continuing to do so.

Paul Jones', 'Patterdale' which won the Alfred Bradley Bursary 2021/2022 aired on ��̳ Radio 4 in February 2022.

Emilie, Gary touched upon how brilliant you were to work with in the ABBA development process when you were paired up together. How did that work for you for you both?

Emilie: Well, I think Gary’s doing himself a disservice saying that he didn't do anything for a start! What I'd written was designed to have aesthetic possibilities, but it was very much the emphasis was on the dialogue, and it was on a sort of aural soundscape, if you like, so we didn't have lots of recalibrating to do, but there was plenty to be trimmed. There was plenty that needed to be clarified.

Like Paul said, getting to hear anyone who's took the time to read your script, and who wants to back it, I think, is just invaluable. You've got to learn to love the notes.

What else is unique about Audio Drama?

Gary: For a start, and not a lot of people know this, but you've got a huge audience. There's nearly a million people who listen to the Radio 4 afternoon play, and when you say this, to maybe a younger audience, they go, ‘What?!’ And then after that, there's the life on ��̳ Sounds so you could probably add another 200,000 - 300,000 on that. You are talking to a quite a large audience.

We’ve mentioned before that it is an intimate medium. You work collaboratively with the audience to conjure up images, and we try to do what's called, ‘lean forward radio’ where you, instead of it being sort of background, you so stop what you do, and you lean forward, and you listen to it. When somebody says, ‘I was driving to the shops and I’d arrived and there was still 10 minutes of your play to finish, and I stayed, and I listened’. You think ‘Result: that's fantastic!’ because you've grabbed them. I think - Alex made that point - you've really got to grab them, because there are so many other things that can go on.

Audio is a great medium and it's very important and the Alfred Bradley feeds into it all with new writers and that keeps it going.

Submissions for the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award 2023 close at 12 noon on Tuesday 11th April 2023.

Further details on how to submit your entry for the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award 2023

Listen to Paul Jones' winning ABBA submission, 'Patterdale' on ��̳ Radio 4 and ��̳ Sounds

Read 'Patterdale' by Paul Jones in our Script Library

Listen to Alex Clarke's winning ABBA submission, ''Waking Beauty'' on ��̳ Radio 4 and ��̳ Sounds

Read 'Waking Beauty' by Alex Clarke in our Script Library

Read 'Pica' by Emilie Robson in our Script Library

The Dos and Don'ts of Audio Drama - plus help, advice and top tips

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Firewall

2022-12-09T10:50:00+00:00

This external content is available at its source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzRKq56pITw&list=PPSV

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Firewall has been adapted for ��̳ Radio 4 and ��̳ Sounds. This landmark adaptation sees the Splinter Cell universe - previously portrayed in the hugely popular video game series, and novels by James Swallow - brought to life on the airwaves for the first time.

The eight-part series follows veteran Fourth Echelon agent, Sam Fisher on a new mission, recruiting and training the next generation of Splinter Cell operatives for the National Security Agency's covert action division.

We spoke to the writers, Sebastian Baczkiewicz and Paul Cornell about how they approached this unique project and what tips they had to offer for writers.

How did you both get started in writing for Radio Drama?

Sebastian Baczkiewicz: So my start was when I was invited to apply to be the Writer in Residence for ��̳ Radio Drama in 2000. I was the first (I don’t think they do it anymore) but that was really the start of my radio writing career. I was writing plays before that and performing as an actor.

I then just carried on making work and did some adaptations of Les Misérables and The Count of Monte Cristo, and originated two series: Pilgrim and Elsinore. I also worked on Home Front.

I never really thought about writing for audio. I've always thought about writing for writing. I think of Radio as a completely visual medium. There are some things you have to sketch in, but the audience is very good at working out what's going on, and the more that you can stimulate their imagination the better, really. Some writers get really hung up about writing for Radio but I've never really worried about it. Drama is drama. Story is story and the technical stuff follows on from the Drama.

Paul Cornell: I'd written a few Doctor Who audios for Big Finish Productions and I’d written two audio plays which Nadia Molinari, the Director of Splinter Cell, also directed. The first of those I got, because I shared an agent with Iain M. Banks, and Iain wanted to have one of his novellas, The State of the Art adapted for radio. So I got into that and I've always loved it.

In your work, you both lean towards Genre (Sci-Fi, Horror, Fantasy). Where did this come from? And what are your influences?

Sebastian: I sort of came into it accidentally. When I started to develop Pilgrim, we were invited to come up with a series idea during a residential (organised by ��̳ Writersroom). I’d just become very interested in folklore and, at the time, there was very little actually about it. Now it's everywhere but then it wasn't, and I just couldn't believe that there was such a resource of English and British folk tales that just sat there in books waiting to be talked about or discovered. I was then very keen to use them as the DNA for stories and not set them in distant times but in our world and explore what would happen if it was true and happening now.

With Genre, I learnt to write through thrillers really. That's always been a big influence on how you tell a story. Hitting the ground running is always a good thing, and I think both Paul and I have done that with Splinter Cell.

Paul: For me, I've been a fan of genre from when I was tiny. I'm a fan of all things fantastical, and I've actually joined a lot of fandoms. I've joined some fandoms before I knew what they were about! It's a wonderful way of being in conversation with one's peers, and knowing the nuts and bolts of how that particular genre works.

I think that Fantasy and Science Fiction provide a tremendous tool box for dealing with the modern world. You know we're living on so many different levels now, and so much that, when I was a youth might have been regarded as fantastical, has simply become how we see the world. How things are. I would take as an example, perhaps, the concept of multiple worlds, which has gone from the realm of abstract physics to people just kind of knowing in their bones that it might be true, and that being reflected in current media, how we can deal with there being multiple Batmen for example.

Genre is steeped in my bones. I am a fan boy from my boots. I'm a Doctor Who fan specifically. I mean, I can quote you detail on that which would make your toes curl! And that fandom especially, that stew of my peers in the early nineties, where we were all getting on together, and we all knew each other and each other's work so well that when one of us got a professional gig, the feeling was "Well, if they can do it, so can I!” There's nothing else like that being part of a gang who will come up together.

Speaking of fandoms, what connection did you have, if any, to the Splinter Cell one?

Paul: I’d played first person shooters, so I was familiar with the genre but not so much the Splinter Cell game itself.

Sebastian: Coming to the Splinter Cell franchise fresh and not being overburdened with ‘Sam Fisher’s got to be this’ and ‘it's going to be that’, was actually quite liberating I found. I think the plus of a fandom situation can be that you know all the ins and outs, you know all the levels, you know who gets killed, where and when and by whom, but coming to it like, ‘Well, this is a new story that's never been heard before’, was the only way Paul and I could come to it. We had to examine this story as though it had never ever been told before and in a completely new way.

The thing about Splinter Cell is that it's very mission based. It’s not like Doctor Who which has got different planets and societies. You're very much in a world that is defined by the game.

Paul: I’d played enough first person shooters to know what we should be doing. For example, one of my scenes in Splinter Cell is set in the railway station where it's very much: you shoot that bulb, you get under that train before those people turn around the corner and I thought that feeling was important for the audio drama.

It's a unique project in that the source material is not only a game but also a novel written by James Swallows which ties into the Ubisoft franchise. How did you approach this?

Paul: Well, oddly, James is one of those peers that I talked about. He was part of that stew back in the day and I haven't seen him for ages! Basically it was taking that structure of the novel and simplifying, compacting and reducing dialogue to what we could use. It was really good to have something to fall back on all the way.

Sebastian: Also, the genre demands strong narrative. The book has got a very strong narrative structure so thank you very much, James! I mean, I had to move a few things. The opening of the book is slightly different from the opening of the radio episode one as I wanted there to be a “hot opening”, as I'm told they say, in the trade. But the changes are really tiny. I don't know about you, Paul?

Paul: I had to zhuzh things around a bit to form cliff-hangers sometimes, and simplified the ending. I think I changed the focus of the very ending in order to give us the possibility of a sequel which was very much what everybody seemed to be after! It was a good solid piece to work from, and I tried not to go against the spirit of it.

Sebastian: Yeah, I think that's well said. That's always your job. Whatever you're adapting from Les Misérables to Splinter Cell. You have to be true to it. It’s no good going off and saying, ‘here's my much better version’. You’ve got to be respectful in the most practical way.

Paul: James also wants us to make him look his best. So it's more respectful to change things if the change is necessary to make it fly, you know.

Were there any other challenges you faced when you were adapting this project?

Sebastian: I think the challenge was to try to emphasise that there is a moral dimension to it which I think needs to be placed. In a game, you can go around shooting as many people as you like, and then you have a lie down but, for a Radio Drama, you can't just go around killing everybody. There has to be something about what it means to do what they do. It was at the forefront of my thinking all the time and I had to retain a kind of moral grip on what could have just been a kind of shoot-‘em-up for the radio. I had to hold that quite strongly in my mind that it was about people, and then people will die, and that can't just be nothing.

Paul: Also I wanted to put in more humour. I think as soon as you put some humour in the audience starts to like the characters and empathise with them more. With Sam Fisher being so down the middle, he really needs people around him who warm him up a bit. He is capable of dry humour, but it's very dry.

Sebastian: What you're saying about humour is really important. It's kind of finding the truth in the genre. That's the really important thing. It's when it feels like the reality of the genre is being adhered to. The rules of the game if you like. We used to say this on Pilgrim, that there's no ‘winking’. There's no: ‘This is crazy, isn't it?!?!’ kind of acting. This is what's really happening and there really is an ancient psychotic spirit from a thousand years ago, and he really is in that front room.

A lot of writers who submit their work to us are interested in genre writing. Do you have any other advice for them?

Sebastian: Don’t wink!

Paul: You have to know your genre really well. I mean if I ventured into, say the Western right now, I would write a pastiche. I would write something that was the most surface gloss on it, because I don't know anything. What you need is to know what other people have done in that genre and be in conversation with that. React to it, or ignore it, or push against it, or go with it, but know where others have trod. That will always serve you well. I mean, if I wanted to write a Western I would go and actually read up a lot about the real old West and find something new to talk about.

People seem to think of Science Fiction and Fantasy as easy genres, because there is not a body of historical fact or anything like a police manual that you can read. But there is a body of work by people who've done a lot of this before and you really should pay attention to that.

Sebastian: I think that's really a good point. Splinter Cell has very defined rules. You know, Sam Fisher’s not going to appear in cabaret any time soon, for example. Interestingly in Pilgrim (which was Fantasy), I had to have really strong rules about what Pilgrim could or could not do. However wild it got, it needed to be held by the reality and the truth of the situation they were in. I think audiences respect that. Even if they don't even necessarily know what you're doing, they know that they are being held, that there are rules in this world, and our respect to the audiences is that we're not just going to break them like that. If we break the rules there'll be a good reason for it.

It’s keeping true to the scenario you set up and not suddenly going, ‘Oh, I did that. But you know what? I can do this because I can do anything!’ That's kind of cheating. If you can do anything, it doesn't mean anything.

You started writing the project in June and then it was on air in early December so it was a quick turnaround! How was that and how did the Radio Drama team support the writing process?

Sebastian: The production team Jessica Mitic, Lorna Newman and Nadia Molinari were on this from the start. So we were working from a brief and could use the book and I guess, in both of our cases, a degree of experience and knowing how to do this, so as not to have a meltdown about it.

Paul: Yes, calm throughout from all sides! Which was lovely. I do think something which would be useful for writers to hear is, my way of working is that I try and get a first draft - I don't know golf at all but to use a golfing metaphor - I try and knock it down the fairway and get it somewhere near the green with the first draft and then lots of notes. With the second draft I'm really looking to get there and to firm it up. My first drafts are often pretty rough so I'm after those notes from the Radio Drama team. They help with that.

Did you both attend the studio for the recording of Splinter Cell? What role does the writer play there?

Paul: I was there for one day and was called upon once or twice to change a line because it wasn't working. I think it's not quite like it is on television where you really are just popping in to say, 'You're all doing very well!' and have lunch and go. There is something for you to do.

With my previous play, the Iain M. Banks one with Nadia Molinari, I got to be on the floor and stand amongst the actors as Nadia directed them. At one point an actor asked us a question and she replied, and then I replied too. Then I found myself going, ‘Oh, sorry! Two voices!’ because on television that would be really a no, no! Then Nadia said, they're grown-ups they can listen to two voices. I really appreciated that. It is definitely more of a writer’s medium and your input is more part of the continual process.

Sebastian: Sometimes, in studio, you can be useful as the shorthand for actors and directors to say what's happened before because we are the ones who've got the overview. We know why people are doing what they're doing, and when they're doing it, as it were. Also sometimes things need to be cut or shortened, and certainly with Splinter Cell I thought of myself in studio as a sort of resource to be called upon and I enjoyed it. I like to see it being made. I think it's just part of the excitement of the process. To me, it's the reward.

IN STUDIO: The character of Sam Fisher from the game series is played by ANDONIS ANTHONY. The role of his daughter Sarah, is played by DAISY HEAD.

What are the challenges you face in writing for Audio?

Sebastian: I think that what we're doing in Radio and Audio Drama often is that we're making something out of absolutely nothing. For TV, you've got a set. You've got lighting. You've got sound for the show. You've got all these things that are 50% of the work. What we have to do is build it up out of nothing and we have to do that by using characters and what they're saying, and what they're talking about, and immediately draw the audience in. You've just got to have an emotional connection immediately to the thing being made.

Paul: And leaning a lot more on dialogue of course.

Sebastian: That's it. There is nothing else. Our job is to make things appear in the imagination of the listener as vividly and as clearly as we possibly can. Radio Drama tends to get overlooked, you know. Obviously, it's not as sexy as television or film, it doesn't have the allure of the lights, but it has brilliant people in it, there are brilliant actors all the time in Radio bringing their talent to the words we make.

IN STUDIO: The character of Brody Teague is played by WILL POULTER.

What are the benefits in writing for Audio?

Paul: I don't think there's any limitation with Audio. It's easier to do special effects!

Sebastian: Exactly. It makes the budgets much more friendly too! One of the great things is, you can develop an idea for television or film and you can be years doing that and that can be - for this writer - that could be quite a soul destroying experience. I know somebody who's been developing a film for nearly twenty years! So the great thing about Radio is that, although you know it doesn't have the kind of high media profile that television and film has, and theatre has to some degree, the advantage is you can realise your work without having to have an £80 million budget.

Paul: I think it's also a very good medium for idea-led Science Fiction. The only person really doing that in movies is Christopher Nolan. He has big visuals to go alongside his big ideas and because audio is led by dialogue, it's led by ideas. So you can actually develop a complicated science fictional argument quite well, and it's hard to do that and maintain great visuals in Film and TV.

Sebastian: Also, dialogue is character, it’s people talking to people. With Splinter Cell, the people come first. We don't have the visuals. We don't have the games. We don't have the guns. We don't have the dripping pipes. We don't have the whole world of that. So what do we have? We have these extraordinary characters, and those are the people that we have to animate into action, and as soon as they're doing something, the audience is with them. So characters don't just talk on Radio. They are doing things to each other in action; action being the operative word. That's true in a Christopher Nolan movie, it’s true in a play at the National Theatre as it is on a radio piece, as it is in EastEnders. It's people doing things to other people using words.

Any further writing advice?

Sebastian: The great joy of writing is cutting. Some less experienced writers find it hard to let go of anything but it's so liberating. You just go, ‘I don't need any of that. I don't need any more exposition. It's just there’. By doing this, you're keeping your work as light on its feet as possible. Also, if you’re interested in Audio Drama, listen to some.

Paul: That is surely the first thing that any aspiring writer should do is actually consume a lot of the thing they want to write. And yet…

Sebastian: There's such a huge variety of work out there. From Splinter Cell to a domestic drama set in Northumberland to a play about street gangs in London. Also The Classic Serial. There’s such a huge umbrella of ideas and content going out every week. Listen to things you're interested in and read. Reading is really important. It fertilises the mind and that's what we’re in the game for.

Paul: I enjoy having my mind fertilised!

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Firewall continues today at 14.15 on ��̳ Radio 4 or you can listen to the whole series as a box set on ��̳ Sounds.

Love Across the Ages on ��̳ Radio 4

2022-09-28T08:49:12+00:00

Shahid Iqbal Khan was a part of our 2020/21 Writers' Access Group and has recently gained a commission with ��̳ Radio 4 for his first Afternoon Drama, Love Across the Ages. Here he shares his experiences of writing for Radio as a deaf writer.

This external content is available at its source: A tweet from writer Shahid Iqbal Khan about recording his first full length Radio Drama, Love Across the Ages

If you’d told me several years ago that I would one day be writing for radio, I would not have believed you. I was convinced that I couldn’t write for radio. I am deaf and listen to very little radio. I listen to podcasts or radio shows that have transcripts available. As a majority of radio content does not have transcripts or subtitles, my exposure to radio drama is limited.

The general rule is that if you want to write for a medium, you should consume, study and observe a lot of the content in that medium. For example, if you want to be a TV writer, you should watch lots of TV. If you want to be a playwright, then you should read playtexts and go to the theatre regularly. As I couldn’t listen to much radio drama, I thought that naturally precluded me from ever writing for the form.

I first became attracted to the idea of writing for radio after attending a workshop by Fin Kennedy as a part of the Write To Play course by Graeae Theatre. I was obligated to attend as part of the course and wasn’t expecting to get much out of it. I sat through it out of politeness. What he said about radio drama resonated with me long afterwards on the train home from London. He said that radio gives you freedom as a writer. You can tell whatever story you like. It could be set on Mars, it could be set in someone’s ear or it could be set in a country you’ve completely made up. You don’t have to worry about budget or CGI. Everything and anything can be conveyed through the ingenious use of sound. This excited the storyteller side of me - this idea that there isn’t a limit in terms of subject or how you choose to tell a story. I decided that I should question my assumptions about who is allowed to write for radio and to just go for it.

You might think my situation is unique but it would not have been possible without trailblazing artists to look up to. There is a history of D/deaf and disabled writers writing for radio. In the 1930s and 1940s, prolific and acclaimed playwright, Teresa Deevy wrote many popular dramas for radio. She originally moved to London to study lipreading before being distracted by the bright lights of theatre and radio. I imagine her sitting in on the recording days and reading the lips of the actors reciting her words. More recently, Sophie Woolley started her career by writing and performing radio plays for the ��̳. Graeae Theatre, a company that places Deaf and disabled artists centre stage, has a long association with radio, producing works such as Amy Dorrit, Three Sisters Rewired and Night of the Living Flatpacks.

This external content is available at its source: Promotional tweet from Poduction Company, Naked Productions with the transmission details of the Afternoon Drama, Love Across the Ages

Through Graeae, I met the wonderful radio producer Polly Thomas. I worked on a 15 minute piece for the Connections series. I really enjoyed the experience. There is something remarkable about hearing your script brought to life by the director, producer, actors, sound designer, composer and editor. Although I didn’t experience the studio recording of this due to lockdown, I got to experience the studio production process with the subsequent short, Brandlesholme, for ��̳ Radio 4 (part of the United Kingdoms series). I loved the open, warm and positive atmosphere at Naked Productions. I was hooked.

Director of Love Across the Ages, Nickie Miles-Wildin, delivering notes during the recording.

Love Across The Ages is my first full length piece for the Afternoon Drama slot. Renowned poet Abu Nuwas guides the listeners through various moments of the ages following the same two men, Saif and Danyaal. Through the course of a day, I often question what I have heard or am hearing. What is that sound? Where is it coming from? I have a similar relationship with history, I don’t always trust what we’ve been told. History is not actual history. History is a man-made construct with many perspectives missing. This drama is my way of navigating through some of that. Abu Nuwas is not a familiar name in the west, his work and legacy lives under the radar. I thought it would be interesting to use that as a way in, as a way of imagining the small yet big moments of relationships lost to time. Both Polly and the brilliant director Nickie Miles-Wildin worked with me to strengthen the link that Abu Nuwas has with the two men. They gave such invaluable input and I could not have done it without them.

This external content is available at its source: Writer Shahid Iqbal Khan sharing the Pick of the Week listing in the Radio Times for his Radio Drama, Love Across the Ages.

Love Across The Ages is now available on ��̳ Sounds.

Download and read Shahid's script in our Radio Drama script library.

How my Alfred Bradley Bursary Award-winning play 'Patterdale' was produced for ��̳ Radio 4

2022-03-09T18:10:43+00:00

Paul Jones is a Liverpool writer who won the most recent Alfred Bradley Bursary Award. His winning play Patterdale quickly went into production and was broadcast in February.

Listen to Patterdale on ��̳ Sounds

Listen to Patterdale on ��̳ Sounds with an introduction from writer Paul Jones

Patterdale started life as a short story I wrote in 2015 - part of a collection set in neighbouring roads in south Liverpool.

I’ve always written but didn’t commit until my forties. I did night school classes with the WEA, took an OU degree (unfinished) which led to me having some short stories published and then studied a Creative Writing MA. None of these courses are essential but I find it helpful being in an environment where writing is treated with respect.

During the first lockdown, I was midway through John Yorke’s screenwriting course when I saw on ��̳ Writersroom's opportunities page that the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award was reopening. Patterdale had a strong central voice and I decided to adapt the story as a radio play. I wrote it like a film script but was constantly on the lookout for moments when sound would benefit the story – a bird’s wings, a swing park, a door being kicked in.

The application process was simple – I already had a ��̳ account from previous submissions to ��̳ Writersroom. I answered a few basic questions then uploaded the script. I found out a few months later I’d been shortlisted. I worked with two assistant producers in developing Patterdale, Lorna Newman and Jess Mitic. We batted the script back and forth and their input was essential. Writing is obviously a solitary business, but their critiques and suggestions helped make it stronger.

Paul Jones hears that he's been announced as the winner of the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award 2021 (the ceremony was held over zoom due to the Covid-19 pandemic)

There were 5 writers in the final and I was surprised and pleased to hear my name called out – the award comes with a £5000 prize and a 12-month mentorship with a ��̳ Radio Drama producer. Jess Mitic called straight afterwards to congratulate me. I then spoke to Pauline Harris, the director, who told me the play was scheduled for broadcast just two months later – an unusually quick turnaround.

I only wanted native Liverpudlians as the dialect is rooted in local knowledge. The production team found the children via local drama groups, and Pauline was open to my suggestions for the adult actors and in understanding the need for authenticity. I turn a programme off if I hear a dodgy accent, so this was vital.

At the readthrough on the first morning Patterdale ran 15 minutes short – it’s a pacy play but this took everyone by surprise as the word count/page count was usual. I sat in the recording suite with Pauline and Sharon Hughes (Shush), the sound engineer, writing new scenes and passing Pauline new bits of script, while Simon Highfield supported the actors inside the studio. Pauline also contributed ideas for key scenes and line changes while trying to direct. This made the process stressful at times, but Pauline and Shush remained remarkably calm. Monday evening was spent looking through previous drafts of the script for scenes that with a bit of rewriting could be worked back into the play.

The Award was established in 1992 to commemorate the life and work of Alfred Bradley, the distinguished ��̳ Radio Drama Producer and is run every two years by Radio Drama North in conjunction with ��̳ Writersroom.

Handing your work over to other people is like watching your child go off to school for the first time, and like an over-anxious parent it was hard to let go. Now I’ve listened a few times and have a little distance, I can see it for what it is - a standalone drama that read well on the page but didn’t complete its journey until the actors and production team brought it to life - excellent performances and direction, sound design that deepened the world both inside and outside Tommy’s head, and music that helped drive the story forward.

Patterdale was broadcast last month on Radio 4 and was selected as Drama of the Week.

Over the past year I’ve written another radio play, adapted from a story in the collection I was working on a few years back, a comedy-drama for theatre, and two television scripts.

Winning the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award was a huge surprise and a terrific confidence-booster. I’m grateful to Alfred’s family for continuing his important work in supporting new voices and to ��̳ Radio 4 Drama for enabling those voices to be heard.

If you’re thinking of writing a radio play, do it. What have you got to lose?

Listen to Patterdale on ��̳ Sounds

Download and read Paul Jones' original script for Patterdale from our script library

Find out more about the Alfred Bradley Bursary for writers in the north of England who are new to audio drama

Our opportunity Write Across Liverpool closes for applications on Thursday 10th March at noon - find out more

How my script "The Lemonade Lads" was produced for ��̳ Radio 4

2021-07-19T09:31:35+00:00

Faebian Averies is the current Wales Writer in Residence with ��̳ Wales, National Theatre Wales and ��̳ Writersroom. She describes how her winning script "The Lemonade Lads" was produced as a Radio Drama for ��̳ Radio 4 during lockdown.

The Lemonade Lads is due to be broadcast today, Monday 19th July on ��̳ Radio 4 and on ��̳ Sounds. My mum said she’s getting scones in for the event. I said it’s about lemonade - she said she prefers scones.

It doesn’t seem ages ago when I was walking back to my parent’s house to tell them I’d won Wales Writer in Residence. ��̳ Wales had told me they wanted to interview me about being shortlisted for the award but when I arrived, they ushered me into the studio, put me on air and told me I’d won. I think the video footage of me winning sheds some light on how overwhelmed (and inarticulate about it) I was. It’s been an incredible journey so far and I urge people to apply to these schemes as I never thought I’d win and it really has allowed me the proper time and support to develop my career.

This external content is available at its source: Watch as Faebian Averies finds out she is the new Wales Writer in Residence, live on ��̳ Radio Wales

I went into my first meeting with ��̳ Radio Drama in Wales around December last year and I think what I quickly realised was how interesting writing for radio is. I’d performed a few of my own monologues for audio but aside from that I had been writing a lot for screen up until that point, having spent the year prior in ��̳ Writersroom Welsh Voices, so for radio I had to start learning how to write for a relatively new medium to me.

The ��̳ sent me a huge archive of audio dramas and for about a week I exclusively wore headphones seeing how radio worked from a writing perspective. I then learnt how amazing it is to go from the idea, to working on the script, to it being recorded and then to hear all the magic that is created by post-production. I’ve really loved that - hearing it come to life - I think audio is such an immersive, unique platform for storytelling and it’s safe to say I’ve fallen quite in love with it.

The ��̳ Writersroom Welsh Voices 2019/20

This play is a product of lockdown in a way, not so much in its subject matter, but its entire conception, process and recording took place remotely. I’d actually met my director, James Robinson, in real life at a Welsh Voices session but for this project we did everything over zoom. The biggest challenge for me was the distractions that come with working from home. In fact, as I write this the building work that went on during the time I was writing and recording The Lemonade Lads is still in full swing, and I’m thinking back to last Christmas when I was putting together the first seeds of this story, shopping online for ear defenders, whilst everyone working remotely across the country was trying to concentrate through their own working from home distractions.

This external content is available at its source: Faebian Averies recording Lemonade Lads drama from home during lockdown

James and I did all the redrafts over email and zoom and then when it came to recording, the cast and production team were in their homes, everyone surrounded by several pillows (Connor Allen by a whole mattress, Steffan Rhodri in a tent), crossing our fingers for as minimal external noise as possible. Luckily, we weren’t interrupted too much and over the course of the two recording days it was an unbelievable joy to hear the words that I’d written tucked away in my bedroom being said by an amazing cast who breathed so much life into the story.

Faebian Averies with the Wales Writer in Residence Award

So, as I sit listening to The Lemonade Lads being broadcast into people’s living rooms on Monday, nervously working my way through several scones - I will be thinking of how very grateful I am to all the people who helped get my work to this point. The panel for the Wales Writer in Residence Award, Helen Perry (former Development Producer for ��̳ Writersroom Wales), James Robinson, the production team, the amazing actors and the glorious people who sell ear defenders online. It’s been an overwhelming experience for me and I have developed a deep appreciation for a medium that is so rewarding for a writer to work in.

Listen to The Lemonade Lads on ��̳ Radio 4 on Monday 19th July 2021 from 2pm or on ��̳ Sounds

Find out more about Faebian Averies on our blog

Keep an eye out on our website and social media for announcements about the next Wales Writer in Residence opportunity

I entered a script for the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award and now it's a Radio 4 Drama

2019-11-26T16:24:48+00:00

Some time ago, I began to think seriously about writing drama. As I had no experience and didn’t know a single soul in the industry, the first thing I did was go to the library and take out a book by a writer I loved, that book being ‘By Jack Rosenthal: An Autobiography in Six Acts.’ The second thing I did was apply to Salford University’s MA in Radio and Television Scriptwriting. It’s been a very long road since then, with a few successes and a lot of frustration along the way. My progress has been slow because I have been busy with family commitments but I tried to use what time I did have developing my ideas and my writing.

Pretty much the first thing I wrote was a very ambitious feature length script based on a real life woman who lived during the English Civil War. Once it was finished I tried to get it noticed by submitting it to a few film festivals. It won the Award of Merit at the Women’s International Film Festival in Los Angeles and the Best War/History script at the Gotham Screen International Film Festival in New York, which was quite a boost to my confidence.

Jill O'Halloran

I was beginning to realise just how tough the industry is and so thought I should try to be as broad as possible in my approach. I applied to the inaugural Liverpool Playhouse and Everyman Playwrights’ Programme where I met some of the nicest and most talented writers in the city, whose friendship and support has been invaluable to me over the past few years.

My first experience of ��̳ Writersroom was their Rapid Response competition In the Red. My script, HAVEN, was selected as one of the winners. Following that I was put in contact with LA Productions in Liverpool. I had several meetings with them over the course of several years and they were, and still are, incredibly supportive of me and my writing. One day I was asked into a meeting only to find it was with Jimmy McGovern. Pretty much the first thing he said to me was “You can write.” I came out of the meeting thinking that I didn’t care if my work was never produced, Jimmy McGovern thinks I can write, and that’s all I need to hear. That meeting eventually led to a commission for MOVING ON; I wrote Episode 4 of Series 9 NEIGHBOUR and the series went on to win the Best Daytime Series at the RTS North West Awards 2018.

Jill O'Halloran's episode of Moving On, 'Neighbour' was broadcast in 2018. Watch a short clip

I can’t remember where I first heard about the Alfred Bradley Bursary, but as I didn’t know anybody who worked in radio I knew it was something I had to have a go at. I had no expectations whatsoever that I would be the runner-up, but I knew I would kick myself if I didn’t meet the deadline.

Discovering I was a finalist was a huge shock to say the least. I was partnered with the radio producer Pauline Harris. She pushed me to take my script to the point of being the very best it could be and I am grateful to her for that. Writing drama is, at its essence, a collaborative process and I have been lucky to work with some incredible people, of which Pauline is one. We pretty much instantly had a richly creative collaboration and I always felt that I was in safe hands with her. I hope that this is a relationship which we can continue in the future. The three months of mentoring was challenging because I was trying to give the script everything I could whilst believing that nothing was likely to come from it. This however, is the stark reality of writing. It’s a leap of faith.

Jill O'Halloran (l) working with Producer Pauline Harris (r)

At the heart of the story is the relation between Cara and Monique, a daughter who is caring for her mother. Like many other people, I have had experience of being a carer, and so I wanted to tell a story on that theme. It was poignant to discover that many of the people involved in the making of MONIQUE & ME, had been, or are currently carers. There are experiences I believe are common to most carers, exhaustion, isolation, grief to name a few. However I wanted to push the characters to the very extreme of their relationship and so their story incorporates other, darker themes too.

As I’d tried a few different platforms for my writing before, theatre, features, television, I wasn't too worried about having a go at writing a radio script. It does require a different way of thinking about the script, but I tried to focus on the fact that the essentials are still the same, a good story, well told.

I didn’t grow up in a house where we listened to Radio 4. I suppose, because of that, I did wonder whether writing for radio was for me, but I’m glad I gave it a shot. What is lovely about radio is the intimacy, not just of the storytelling, but also the smaller cast and crew and I was chuffed to bits to discover that unlike television, radio writers are required to attend the recording. Radio, like MOVING ON, attracts incredibly talented actors, and the actors who Pauline cast all exceeded my already high expectations with their performances.

Monique and Me is broadcast on ��̳ Radio 4 on Thursday 28th November 2019 at 2.15 and available on ��̳ Sounds. It stars Sian Thomas, Christine Bottomley and Millie Kinsey

It’s perhaps no coincidence that MOVING ON and MONIQUE & ME are both forty-five minute original stories. The experience of having written MOVING ON probably did help me get MONIQUE & ME into decent shape. To have a script brought to life in this way and then broadcast to an audience is quite simply a privilege and to have gone through this twice now makes everything worthwhile.

Jill O'Halloran in the studio

Like most other writers, I don’t know what’s next for me. I am developing ideas and writing, as well as trying to get an agent. Whatever happens, I’ll still write because I want to.

I have been asked if I have any advice for other writers. I suppose my best advice is to have a long, hard look at yourself and decide if writing is really something you want to do, because it is incredibly tough. However, if the answer is yes, then do what I do. Work hard and act like you don’t know when you’re beaten.

Listen to Monique and Me on ��̳ Radio 4 on Thursday 28th November at 2.15 or on ��̳ Sounds

Find out more about the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award for Radio Drama and get advice on writing for Radio

Read Radio Drama scripts in our script library

Writing Radio Drama

2019-03-18T16:12:27+00:00

Lorenzaccio, which was broadcast on Radio 3 on Sunday 10 March and is available to listen to now on ��̳ Sounds, is my 21st script for ��̳ Radio. Lorenzaccio is an adaptation of a French play by Alfred de Musset from the 1830s that I fell in love with as a student and have wanted to find some way of bringing to wider attention ever since. It is set in the Florence of the Medicis in the 1530s, a place of corruption and wealth, cruelty and revenge. It’s a play from the Romantic movement, which, in French playwriting, meant drawing on the sprawling model of Shakespeare rather than the austere purity of the Greeks. Lorenzo, the anti-hero of Lorenzaccio, is a turbulent, troubled soul who has infiltrated the corrupt Medici court with the secret aim of getting close enough to the Duke to assassinate him; but as he gets close to achieving his goal he realises he has lost any sense of his real self and his exposure to the brutal side of humanity has threatened to tarnish his hopes in liberation. It’s an epic play with a whole city as its landscape, and it’s often referred to as the French Hamlet.

Lorenzaccio, adapted by Dan Rebellato for ��̳ Radio 3. Listen now on ��̳ Sounds.

When my producer, Polly Thomas, and I first started thinking about pitching Lorenzaccio as a project to Radio 3, we had to make several decisions. For one thing, the play is enormously long, probably pushing five hours. We had to find a way of bringing it down to fit the ninety-minute slot without wholly sacrificing the epic scale that is so distinctive and thrilling about the play. Second, when we pitch a project, we always ask ourselves, why this play and why now? Third, and most important, why is this a play for radio? What will the specific form and dynamics of sound drama add to this play?

The form we eventually arrived at was, in a way, an answer to all three questions. Lorenzaccio is a nineteenth-century play set in the sixteenth century but it is very contemporary. We live in a turbulent political period and many of us have asked, what can good people do in bad times? Lorenzaccio is asking the very same question and, indeed, Musset wrote this historical play in part as a way of reflecting on the thwarting hopes, the compromises, the contradictions of his own era. We thought we wanted to let Musset speak to our times too. We considered entirely relocating the play to the present, to set the play, for example, in something like the Trump White House, but we decided against it; for one thing, there are many aspects of the plot – like the machinations of a Papal envoy to secure a position of authority in the Court – that fit perfectly well in the logic of sixteenth-century Florence but would strain credulity in the twenty-first-century US. But also, my initial impulse was that I wanted people to get to know Lorenzaccio by Musset, not a new play vaguely inspired by it.

Dan Rebellato with Producer Polly Thomas

We decided to do something that is extremely common in the theatre, but something we’d rarely heard done on the radio; that is, a modern-dress production. I was very struck by Nick Hytner’s production of Othello at the National Theatre in 2013. The language was more or less unchanged, but the action was transferred to the contemporary world, in military bases, neon-lit offices, and so on. The transposition was so perfect that the play was clear and utterly thrilling; I remember my wife saying to me as we went out at the interval "I can’t wait to see the next episode!" It had that box-set feeling to it. Of course, modern dress is scarcely the point in radio, but our version was to retain the play’s sixteenth century setting and language (Cardinal, Duke, Marchesa, Your Highness, Sire, etc.) but create a wholly twenty-first-century sound world; that is, they would still speak of sending letters and fighting with swords but we would hear Skype and gunfire. This in turn answered how this play would gain a particular radio life, as the work of the listener would be to coordinate in their minds the fiction and the world, enjoying, we hoped, the reframing of the action in modern forms.

Of course, as I was translating the play from French as well as adapting it, there is, in literal terms, none of Musset’s actual language, and the choices you make as translator are never neutral. I tried to replicate Musset’s mixture of modern French and a quasi-Shakespearean reach into metaphor and image – I had to find a language in which the characters could both say (as the character Philippa does) "each murder begets murder and soon hatred takes root, sons are buried in the coffins of their fathers, and each new generation springs from the ground with a sword in his hand" and (as the Duke says of Lorenzo’s sister) "I like a girl who talks dirty"; this seemed also a way of conveying Musset’s shimmering ambiguity between the contemporary and historical. And sometimes I smoothed somewhat the clash between the Digital Age and the Renaissance by slightly opening out the language to permit both centuries, so that the characters usually speak of ‘weapons’ rather than, say, ‘daggers’. The effect, I hope, is of a certain collage, the language clashing and shifting between high and low, old and new, alien and familiar, which is, I think, what Musset is doing too.

��̳ Radio 4's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - early inspiration for writer Dan Rebellato.

Every project is different of course and the more I’ve worked in radio, the more interesting the form seems to be. With hindsight, I suppose I listened to quite a lot of audio drama when I was growing up (The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy was a particular favourite), but when I started writing for radio drama in the late 1990s, I was slightly daunted by what seemed a strange and unfamiliar medium. Is it a wholly verbal form of drama or do you want to create an entire physical landscape for your play? What does action sound like? Do you need a narrator to populate and describe the world? I puzzled over these things until I got a great piece of advice from Polly, my producer: write it like a screenplay.

In other words, radio is a visual medium: it’s just that the images play out in the mind. Famously, when radio drama was being developed at the ��̳ in the mid-1920s, they struggled to figure out how to make sense of a storytelling medium that was entirely sound and so set the first play down a coal mine during a blackout (A Comedy of Danger by Richard Hughes), thus providing a rationale for the lack of visuals. And no doubt, some very interesting plays can be created in that way, but it’s not necessary and it’s as thrilling for the radio listener to suddenly experience something visually extraordinary happening. One of my first plays had one of the architects of the Houses of Parliament blow up the building the night before it was due to be opened by Queen Victoria: he describes watching St Stephens’ Tower rising up out of the explosion like a rocket and soaring into the air. Equally, and perhaps just as perversely, radio drama loves silence: the moment where, if you’ve hooked the audience in right, they are leaning in, totally absorbed in that invisible soundless space, because the characters have stopped talking and something has happened and we want to know what. Visuals, silence and not knowing what’s happening; against all the odds, these seem immensely valuable tools for radio drama.

Erskine May by Dan Rebellato, an historical fantasy, based on the legendarily fractious partnership between the two architects of the Houses of Parliament

Radio drama is a wonderful medium for a writer. In almost all cases, the script is fundamental to the experience, so you really get to hear how your writing ideas have worked out. There’s very little time in the recording to make substantial changes, so it is very exposing for a writer; the play stands and falls on the writing, which can be thrilling and can be mortifying, but you will learn about your writing by writing for radio in a very intense way. You also get to work with the most extraordinary actors: I’ve had Alex Jennings, Michael Palin, Glenda Jackson, Sam West, Anna Maxwell Martin, Bill Nighy, Sarah Parish, David Harewood and too many more to mention individually in my plays. Not all actors enjoy radio, but those who do can find wonderful things in your writing that you didn’t even know were there.

It’s also wonderful for a writer because you have an audience. Something around a million people listen to the ��̳ Radio 4 Afternoon Drama (just after The Archers on a weekday afternoon); in fact I was once told that, because of The Archers, the Afternoon Drama usually starts with around two million listeners and loses half its audience by the end. I’ve always had that image in my mind; the listener finishing their dose of Ambridge life, their hand reaching for the off-switch. How do you keep them? How do you quickly immerse them in a new world, a new story, a new experience, and keep them there? If you can, of course, it’s a staggering thing to imagine a million or more people listening to your work: to put that in perspective, it took the musical Les Misérables around two years to play to its millionth audience member. And you often get lovely messages from people, and now because of social media, you get live commentary, which is... mostly enjoyable.

My Life Is a Series of People Saying Goodbye - by Dan Rebellato

Finally, radio is a valuable writer’s medium because, more than most TV, more than most theatre, it is a space to experiment. Sure, there are some conventional radio plays, and many of them are great, but there are 250 Radio 4 Afternoon Dramas a year, 250 episodes of the 15-Minute Drama during Woman’s Hour, 50 episodes of the Classic Serial, 50 Saturday Dramas; that’s a lot of space to fill and a very loyal audience, who don’t want the same thing every day. My experience of the ��̳ Radio Drama audience is that they are hungry for new things, new ideas, new experiences. I wrote a play, Cavalry, a few years ago which purports to be the recordings – glitches and all – of a ��̳ reporter interviewing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at the End of the World. I wrote another, My Life is a Series of People Saying Goodbye, which was a collage made up of scenes of people saying goodbye to someone else (a wife divorces a husband; a schoolgirl says goodbye to a favourite teacher; a constituency party deselects its MP, etc.), but we blurred the boundaries between the stories, so that the character sometimes changed before the actor, or the setting changed before the dialogue. It created a tapestry of loss and longing and I still find the production and those wonderful actors very moving as the various stories start to knit together and the emotions build on each other. Radio drama is a very flexible form with a very flexible audience.

But to say, as some do, that radio drama is a writer’s medium is only part of the truth. It’s also important for me to acknowledge that my work in radio has all been a collaboration with my producer, Polly Thomas. Every idea goes through a long process of discussion and thinking, with Polly advising, adding ideas, giving feedback. It is the producer who will turn all the various ideas you come up with together into what you hope is a commissioner-friendly pitch. If the play is then commissioned, the producer will comment on drafts and discuss casting, music, the sound ‘feel’ of a project. They direct it on recording days and have the final word on the edit. So, while it’s absolutely the case that I do all of the actual writing, the final drama is inextricably a creative collaboration.

A third figure that I must mention is the sound designer (though might sometimes be credited as co-producer or editor or something else), who is the figure responsible technically for recording the actors and is a key figure in bringing everything together in the final edit. In the last few projects I’ve been very lucky to work with Eloise Whitmore, who is a sound designer of genius. She has an extraordinary ear and is able to put sounds together, change a few settings, and suddenly you’re in a Renaissance cathedral or in the middle of a nineteenth-century battle or on the moon.

Any radio playwright needs a Polly and an Eloise, by which I mean, you need brilliant people with whom you collaborate as equals, because when you work with great people (producers, sound designers, actors) it inspires you to try more and more complex things, to challenge yourself and your audience, to push at the edges of the form.

The ��̳ is one of the most prolific producers of radio drama in the world. It’s a really valuable space for writers at all levels to develop their craft before a large, demanding and engaged audience. When I started, I think there was, in some quarters, a vague idea that radio drama was a rather old-fashioned form. Now, in the world of podcasting – where you can gather a few friends, some pretty basic equipment, and a couple of bits of free software and send that out literally across the world – radio drama is at the leading edge of the culture. There is an expansive intimacy about radio drama, a form that is collectively experienced individually, that seems to speak to our world of tribes, bubbles, walls and borders, yet reaches out across those dividing lines to encourage us to understand and experience a thousand possible and impossible worlds.

Listen to Lorenzaccio now on ��̳ Sounds

Find out more about Dan Rebellato on his website

Getting my first broadcast credit

2018-04-19T15:51:08+00:00

The first rule of fight club is don’t talk about –

Sorry, wrong room.

The first rule of writing is that you have to start somewhere. Very often, when we read about successful writers, it’s easy to imagine that they were always destined to be great, with talent and luck on their side.

Talent and luck have their role to play. But behind every success, there are usually a lot of failures. Years of failures, maybe. Stacks of rejections. Petri dishes of disappointment, multiplying into yet more disappointment. Picnic hampers of shame.

I very recently got my first broadcast credit as a comedy writer. When I think back to how it happened, all of the above is definitely true.

Ling Low

I grew up wanting to be a writer, but I wasn’t sure exactly what kind of writer. After university, I did bits and pieces: writing short stories and short films, trying stand-up comedy. Then, a few years ago, I started submitting jokes to Newsjack, the ��̳’s radio comedy show which accepts submissions from anyone.

I submitted week after week, and heard nothing. When a new season started, I submitted again. Then, one day, a producer emailed me. He had some bittersweet news, he said: one of my jokes had been selected for the week’s script, but it had been cut from the broadcast version.

My joke had been good enough to be picked out from the submissions, but still – good wasn’t good enough. At this point, I could have been frustrated or encouraged. I decided on the latter, and I kept submitting. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any more emails. Had I peaked with a one-liner joke? I hoped not.

The Felix Dexter Bursary from ��̳ Comedy

In 2017, the ��̳ launched the Felix Dexter bursary for BAME comedy writers. Again, I applied. Again, I was rejected. But this time, the rejection was definitely encouraging: I made the shortlist, out of over a hundred applicants, and then I got through to the final stage of interviews with Sarah Asante, the Commissioning Editor for Comedy at ��̳ Three, and Shane Allen, the Controller of Comedy Commissioning at the ��̳.

The ��̳ Writersroom made the effort to keep in touch with me after that process, so I got an email in late 2017 about a new sketch show that was looking for writers. I submitted three sketches, two were selected and one of them – hallelujah – made it to the broadcast edit.

By now, I knew it was possible to come very close to something and still miss out, so I didn’t tell anyone. Even after the producer confirmed one of my sketches was going to be included in the first episode, I sat on the good news. After all, I thought, they might change their minds. Or the world might end. One of the two.

Sketchtopia from ��̳ Radio 4

In the end, though, my sketch was broadcast on Sketchtopia, ��̳ Radio 4’s new sketch comedy show, and here I am, writing a blog post about it.

The feeling of writing comedy for the ��̳ is amazing, and it’s also surreal. I grew up watching ��̳ comedies: one of my earliest memories of TV is the theme song from Only Fools and Horses. Later on, a comedy came along that was particularly special: Goodness Gracious Me.

Goodness Gracious Me

As a Malaysian Chinese girl growing up in a small English city, Goodness Gracious Me blew open the world of possibilities. Suddenly, I was seeing brown people making jokes that I could relate to personally. The one about the competitive mums cuts quite close to home, even now. (Hi mum, I’ll call you back later).

Sketchtopia, the radio show that broadcast my comedy sketch, has roots in Goodness Gracious Me, as well as other great British sketch shows. Because of the ��̳ Writersroom, I got the opportunity to add my voice to this comedy tradition. So, thanks, ��̳ Writersroom! If you were a person, I’d buy you a beer.

Listen to Sketchtopia now on ��̳ iPlayer

Sign up and download the Comedy of the Week podcast

How I found myself inside the Drama Room

2017-10-11T15:44:31+00:00

I should caveat this blog post by saying ‘I never imagined I would be writing a blog for the ��̳ and, if the words aren’t in the right order, it’s because I’ve drunk my own body weight in tea and prioritised sorting out my sock drawer as a procrastination from having to write something that I didn’t feel I was equipped enough to write about (on the plus side, my sock drawer is looking great).

I’ll start at the beginning. Ish. This being in a crazy, brilliant little place in the Oxfordshire countryside (aka The Oxford School of Drama) where I trained as an actor. I love acting and still juggle it alongside writing but upon graduating I realised my desire was to tell stories, and that didn’t necessarily mean I had to be the one saying them out loud. I was also bored of scripts I received depicting feisty/sexual/innocent one-dimensional women whose only purpose was to serve the journey of the male protagonist, so after a few glasses of wine one wet Tuesday evening, declared I’d have a bash at making the words happen myself.

So I started writing. First a 5 minute play followed by a few 15 minute plays followed by a full length play I wrote whilst on the Soho Theatre Writers’ Lab (which I strongly recommend). I’ve done it, I thought, I’ve written an actual play with actual words (and a – hopefully – well rounded female protagonist) what next?! Well what came next was a series of rejections and back to the aggressive tea drinking unable to focus on writing the next thing.

I carried on writing but wasn’t sure what it was for, it felt indulgent, did I really have anything of any interest to say anyway? And what was the point, I wasn’t going to change the world with a story. And these words weren’t paying my rent. I felt defeated. Then something lovely happened, I landed an acting job with the incredible Cardboard Citizens, a theatre company who work with homeless and ex-homeless people and tell their stories. We toured to theatres, prisons and homeless hostels and I was humbled and privileged to see the effect our story was having on people. Stories have power, I remembered.

So I started writing again, still with only the theatre in mind – someone like me with no connections to the TV world and no idea what a pitch was (the grassy kind is the closest I’d ever come before) would clearly never get to write for the telly.

Hayley Wareham

Then around Christmas last year a friend and fellow writer suggested I submit my play (the one I’d written when at Soho, the one gathering dust under my bed) to the ��̳ Writersroom Open Submission window. I scoffed. It’s a play! They won’t want a play. They want the next Line of Duty or Happy Valley. Then I did a bit of reading and discovered you could get feedback if you got through to a certain round. Well some free feedback would be great, I thought.

So in the script went and off I went back on tour and thought nothing more of it. Until an email landed in my inbox for an interview at the ��̳. Now, we’ve all seen W1A where the intern puts the wrong letters in the wrong envelopes and I thought ‘oh that’s what’s happened here’, some poor intern has sent the interview email to the rejection pile and they’re about to get a bollock-ing worse than the time they put normal milk in the Commissioner’s coffee (a recent convert to Veganism). But the retraction email didn’t come so along I went to the interview, unsure of what to wear as a “writer”, crippled with nerves.

At reception I was met by ��̳ Writersroom Development Producer Abigail Gonda whose first comment upon seeing me ‘Hayley? I knew it was you, you look like a writer’ put me completely at ease. The interview was tough but inspiring and I left desperate to be offered a place.

And here I am.

These could be yours...

We began in June and have had three sessions thus far. All the other Drama Room writers are lovely and I’ve already learnt so much. And being given a ��̳ Writersroom pen makes you feel like a proper writer (also I’m a pretty poor actor so free stuff always makes me happy. They’ve got great notebooks too…..)

Last week we had our Radio Drama Day at Broadcasting House.

Ahead of the session Abigail sent us a bunch of ��̳ Radio Dramas to listen to and I was pleasantly surprised to find so many I enjoyed. Comment is Free by James Fritz is an incredible piece of drama and demonstrates perfectly the freedom of the form of radio and what you can achieve with it. Fritz uses twitter threads and online comments to tell the story in a way that wouldn’t be achievable on TV or in theatre. Accompanying these radio plays was a request from Abigail for us to write a 75 word pitch for a radio drama that we would pitch to a producer during the day and get feedback on. The mere thought of this made me want to vomit a kidney.

RADIO DAY

The day consisted of advice, chats and tips from a myriad of ��̳ radio producers and a tour of the recording studios. I learnt SO much about pitching, different radio drama slots, the writer producer relationship, the importance of sound and what will and won’t work on radio.

GOFCOR = Good on film. Crap on radio.

Then came the pitching with Producer Marc Beeby. The pitching stuff of nightmares is me standing in a room full of angry looking important people while I fumble around with pages of illegible writing forgetting what my idea was and ending up with a persistent cough (sorry Theresa). This was nothing like that. We were sat down (hurray!) and had 5 minutes to chat about why we wanted to tell the story and essentially, what the story was. Marc was really helpful and I feel confident I now know how to make the most of those 75 words (which is not very many and as you can tell from the length of this blog, if you’ve got this far, I tend to overwrite…).

5 Top Tips for writing Radio Drama from Commissioner Jeremy Howe

Finally came speed-dating* with some more ��̳ Producers. 5 minutes to chat about your idea, your previous work, what you think of radio, what you’ve learnt. This again was far less intimidating than I expected. I left the day feeling exhausted, inspired, and with both kidneys safely intact.

Our radio day has completely changed what I thought radio drama was. The 45 minute Afternoon Drama on Radio 4 gets on average 2 million listeners. That’s more people than I could ever hope to reach with a play in the theatre, even if it was in the Olivier (Rufus, you know where I am). Similar to TV, radio transcends class and location – it’s free and it comes to you! You can do things in radio that are tricky to pull off in the theatre and expensive on TV. It’s a really exciting medium and one that I think is about to undergo a bit of a revolution…

*of the pitch variety. No Cilla Black in sight. Ok that’s not really speed dating is it but I’ve never been and can’t think of any other cultural reference points

I will leave you with my top tips:

1. Keep writing
2. Don’t take rejection as a concrete truth on your piece. You wrote it because the story is important to you and there will be someone else out there just as excited about that story
3. Help each other. One of the writers from our group is far more experienced than me having pitched her own work and written for continuing drama. What started as intimidation of her CV quickly turned into realising there was so much I could learn from her and she’s been so incredibly generous (even sending me her pitches!)
4. The best cup of tea is made with Unsweetened Almond milk
5. Listen to loads of radio drama and find out which producers are producing the work you like
6. The ��̳ is not a closed shop. I didn’t think I’d be here. They’re friendly and encouraging and supportive; anything but scary
7. Keep writing
8. And finally – you’re very unlikely to vomit a kidney, so don’t waste too much time worrying about it

Find out more about our Drama Room writer development group

Daniel Hopewell on why you should write the story you want to tell

Breaking Up With Bradford: Writing my first Radio 4 Afternoon Drama

2017-08-15T14:12:18+00:00

Inception

It’s that thing of ‘what you seek is seeking you’. I’m glad the writing found me; I’d always scribbled stuff, but never imagined being a writer for radio drama.

My first introduction to writing for radio was through winning The Verb New Voices 3 for an 8 minute commission on The Verb on ��̳ Radio 3. It was produced by Charlotte Riches - and that was the birth of a beautiful working relationship. We’d connected over our mutual love for afternoon tea - amongst other things. After that, I went on to write a 30 minute episode for The Headline Ballads series on Radio 4 last year. However, writing an Afternoon Drama was my first (slightly daunting) 45 minute slot. Charlotte invited me to pitch some ideas and together we came up with (drum roll)…Breaking Up With Bradford. We pitched that to the commissioner and then…

Kamal Kaan (Photo Credit: Maria Spadafora)

Writing Process

Hooray! It had got commissioned! Now the adventure began...

I had about 9 months to write the script – which sounds like a long time, but I find that the creative process is less about just simply writing, but allowing the time for ideas to evolve and ferment organically. I happily spent hours listening to lots of radio drama and reading things completely unrelated to help nourish the brain and soul. So when it came to actually writing, I was armed with a rich palette of colours to paint with. Next step – start painting: beat sheet followed by a detailed scene by scene. My background in Architecture has imbued the importance of structure; working out the mechanics before building the bricks of dialogue. I then had just over 4 weeks to do 5 drafts of the script. I worked with both Charlotte and Caitlin Crawford on notes. It felt like an effortless process because they were very much attuned with my idea and they made it a highly enjoyable experience – we kept saying, we’re having way too much fun as it doesn’t feel like work!

Location Recording

The next exciting episode was casting the actors. I was given the opportunity to be part of the casting process and selecting the musical soundtrack of the piece. This gave it a real sense of authorship, (I even managed to write myself in as a character for a cheeky little scene). Charlotte then had the great idea of recording on location as the city itself played an integral role in the story. Having grown up and currently living in Bradford, it was nice to pay homage to such a historical city.

On location : My Lahore’s Restaurant , Bradford. Charlotte Riches (Producer/ Director) Steve Brooke (Sound) Luke Newberry and Darren Kuppan (Actors )(Photo Credit: Kamal Kaan)

As the piece was recorded on location, it felt like screen-writing; working out a spatial continuity of geographies from scene to scene. Whilst simultaneously playing with the juxtaposition of fictional characters within non-fictional locations. Recording on location came with the challenge of contending with the great British weather (and me being the optimist wrote a pivotal scene where the characters are outside in the glorious sun with the sunlight hitting against the famous sandstone buildings), of course that never happened on the day, despite recording in June, it was grey and blustery! Luckily, I was on hand to make amendments to the script.

On location: City Park Mirror Pool, Bradford. Charlotte Riches (Producer/ Director) Steve Brooke (sound) Luke Newberry and Darren Kuppan (Actors) (Photo Credit: Kamal Kaan)

Reflection of process

The project has been a real labour of love motivated by my own experiences of Bradford. As a writer, I’m inspired by writing fresh representations of minorities to re-author lazy stereotypes and create multi-layered perspectives. My radio play is a total mash up of genres: drama with comedy framed by poetry. I like that. It’s a reflection of the multifaceted strands that make me. My writing strives to hold up a mirror to reflect how a single experience can diffract over a wide spectrum of society to remind us that we are all of the same difference, in a world of increasing division, stories can help us seek the change we want to see.

Listen to Breaking Up With Bradford on ��̳ Radio 4 on Thursday 17 August 2017 at 2.15pm and on ��̳ iPlayer

Download and read the script for Breaking Up With Bradford

Kamal Kaan is a writer and performer. He read Architecture at Cambridge University and awarded a scholarship to undertake an MA in TV Fiction Writing at Glasgow Caledonian University. His work for theatre has won Gold and Silver at World Stage Design in 2013 and 2017. He is an Associate Artist with Freedom Studios and currently developing work with The Bush Theatre and The West Yorkshire Playhouse.

Kamal is part of ��̳ Writersroom's Drama Room Writer Development scheme 2017.

Girls - Theresa Ikoko brings her award-winning play about the kidnapping of three Nigerian girls to Radio 4

2017-07-12T09:51:36+00:00

What did you have to do and think about to adapt your stage play Girls for radio?

The main thing was the strict time constraint. I thought that would be really tough. It actually went really smoothly. I thought I would have to lose character and story, but I don't think I did. It made me want to take a look at the stage play and see if there was anything in it that wasn't needed.

But one thing that I did notice was that in 45 minutes, the subtle things you think you're saying sort of scream. I had to think about whether I wanted to boldly make declarations or not because it was a little harder to hide things behind characters and their nuances.

Sound is so important with radio. It seems obvious, but people are really listening. The words and sounds tell the whole story, so you have to offer a little more for the listeners' imagination to grab hold of - to make up for the things that weren't being seen. In a way it made the story feel quite limitless. The audience can paint whatever picture you outline. It can be as vast or as delicate as the story requires.

The cast of Girls on Radio 4 (Faith Alabi, Joan Iyiola, Amaka Okafor)

How was the production process different?

The production process was so quick and intense. It was all over in two long days, in a windowless room. It definitely built a really close team, super fast.

It felt really organic and collaborative. Ideas were happening in the room and being tried then and there. There were so many people with such specific expertise that I was able to run things by - lines that didn't feel like they worked or story that I wasn't sure came across. Sometimes the answer wasn't in the words but in the microphone positioning, foley work or sound effects etc.

It was amazing to see how large scale scenes were made with skill and innovation and simple props.

I think the time pressure added an excitement to the process. Everything felt immediate and urgent.

Not having rehearsal time was really different to the theatre process. But I knew the actors involved and I was really confident in them. They were familiar with their characters and the story so it felt like we had a head start. I think that helped with not having time to really unpick the script and rehearse like in theatre. The actors were so instinctive and brave and open and I think it just made the process feel super alive and electric.

Theresa Ikoko

How is the writer’s role in the production process different?

I don't know if my role felt very much different than it did with theatre. I have a super close and trusting relationship with Abigail Gonda, the producer. I think working with someone you admire and trust, in any forum, makes it easy and offers a learning experience. Abigail really gets me and I think we have such a mutual fondness for and understanding of the characters and story that it was so easy to communicate and hash out challenges with cuts, story etc. I really didn't want it to be over when we were done. It was a dream team, that I feel very fortunate to have been a part of.

What have you learned in writing for radio?

Radio has broadened my thinking about how I tell stories. I found the visual limitation challenging at first and then liberating. I'm really keen to see how thinking about sound can do more for my stage and/or screenwriting.

Timing has been crucial too. I'm not one for long stories but I think I can look at doing more with less time. I think there is an presumption that epic stories need epic running times and intervals. Though there is of course a place for that, and some of my favourite plays and films run well over two hours, but I think I've learned that I don't need minutes to justify or prove scale.

Theresa Ikoko won the Alfred Fagon Award in 2015 and the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright in 2016. She studied psychology and has a Masters in Criminology and Criminal Justice. Theresa has had a variety of roles in prisons, secure settings and social inclusion/community engagement projects and now works in the area of gangs and serious youth violence.

Listen to Girls on ��̳ Radio 4 on Friday 14th July 2017 at 2.15pm and on ��̳ iPlayer

Theresa Ikoko was part of our first Drama Room development group

The Newsjack Writers' Room

2017-02-08T17:12:49+00:00

Exclusive to ��̳ Radio 4 Extra, Newsjack showcases the week's news stories which have been lovingly bashed, mashed and moulded into sketches and one-liners. Anyone can submit material to go into the show alongside material from the show's core group of writers. Claire Wetton explains how she made the move from submitting material to being part of the show's Writers' Room...

When I first received an email asking me into the Writers' Room as a commissioned writer for an episode of Newsjack, I did what I presume all professional comedy writers do. I screamed, jumped in the air, did a little dance, ran down the stairs, ran back up the stairs, did another little dance…and then freaked the motherfudger* out.

Like most people, Newsjack was my first ‘proper’ job in comedy writing. Up to that point, I’d been writing sketches on my own, in my PJs, in the hope that I was maybe producing something mildly amusing. But writing a sketch about a killer gang of goats in my bedroom on a Sunday evening was one thing. Writing some award-winning, cutting edge, biting satire at the ��̳, in front of actual producers, whilst wearing actual clothes, was something totally different. I was filled with a mixture of overwhelming terror, irrepressible excitement, and of course, an unnecessary amount of anxiety about which notepad I should use to make sure I was being taken seriously.

Claire Wetton

If you don’t know what the Newsjack Writers' Room is, then let me explain. As you probably know, Newsjack is the ��̳’s open door show (if you don’t know about Newsjack, there are plenty of blogs on here about how you can get involved). Anyone can submit either sketches or one-liners to the show. If the production team consistently enjoys the work you’re submitting, they may ask you to come in and be part of the Writers' Room. I’d been submitting both one-liners and sketches every week for one series when I was called in. In that time, I’d had one sketch and 3 one-liners on air.

So what happens in the Newsjack Writers' Room? Well, about six writers and two producers meet on a Monday morning somewhere in the ��̳, to come up with ideas for that week’s show. As a writer you’re expected to come to the meeting with two to three sketch ideas, based on stories from that weekend’s news. I tend to take four to six ideas, as sometimes another writer pitches a brilliantly biting sketch idea about killer goats, which blows yours out the water. You want to have something else you can fall back on.

Claire (second from right) with the Newsjack Writers' Room

The pitching meeting sounds scarier than it is. The good thing about Newsjack is that it’s a show for new writers. Everyone in the room remembers what it was like the first time they pitched a sketch in front of a roomful of strangers. There’s a definite spirit of support in the room, and no one is judging you based on your pitches.** Some of the worst pitches end up being the best sketches, and vice versa.

The producers will ask each writer to pitch their favourite idea. If it’s your first time in the room, you won’t be asked to pitch first, so you’ll have the chance to see how it’s done before it’s your go. Once you’ve pitched an idea, the producer may make some suggestions on how you might want to frame the sketch or how to best focus the idea. The rest of the writers may then pitch in some jokes or ideas that may help you write your sketch (which you are free to use or ignore). Then we keep doing that until all the ideas have been pitched, and everyone has at least two sketches to work on.

Once the morning meeting is done, you have about two hours to write your first drafts. You can do this however you want. Most writers tend to stay in the meeting room, and work in there where we can support each other with ideas and cups of tea, but you’re welcome to go and find a quiet space on your own if you work better that way.

Once you’ve finished your first draft, the producers will read them and provide you with some feedback, so you have the afternoon to redraft and create some truly award-winning, cutting edge, biting satire. Or a sketch about a gang of killer goats. You never know with Newsjack.

Newjack presenter Angela Barnes gives tips on how you can get your material on the show…

Excellent things about writing for Newsjack in the writers room.

1. You get to pitch your idea to a producer before you write it. That way, you know whether they’re interested in putting it in the show or not, before you come up with 25 puns about killer goats.
2. You get to meet and work with other writers. Everyone at Newsjack is really supportive and generous with their ideas, so when, for example you shout out ‘Urgh, apparently I can’t murder this robot at the end of my sketch. What can I do?!’ Someone else might shout out, ‘Send him off to Robot Wars!’ thereby, giving you a perfect ending you’d have never thought of yourself. (This is a true story. I told you the Newsjack room’s full of award winning, biting satire.)
3. There’s no guarantee your work will make it to air just because you’re in the Writers' Room, but as you’ve spent a whole day getting feedback from producers, you do have a much better chance.
4. You get to go and work at Television Centre. And drink tea out of ��̳ mugs. And pretend you’re dead cool and important.
5. You get to build up relationships with producers across the radio comedy department, which can lead to work on other comedy shows. Which is also exciting.

Bad things about writing for Newsjack in the writers room.

1. They really do frown on you writing in your PJs.

I’m writing for my 5th series of Newsjack now, and I’ve had all sorts of opportunities and experiences from it. It’s one of my very favourite things to do. And someone always comments on my choice of notepad.

*Insert your own expletive here
**Although I may be judging you on your choice of notepad.

Newsjack is open for submissions of sketches and one-liners now with weekly deadlines on Mondays and Tuesdays until 28th February

Find out more about Newsjack including How to submit your sketches and one-liners

Listen to Newsjack on ��̳ iPlayer

Alfred Bradley Bursary Award 2015/16 - Shortlist Announced

2015-12-11T11:00:02+00:00

The shortlist for this year's Alfred Bradley Bursary Award has been announced. The following writers will receive 3 months development with ��̳ Radio Drama North, working towards the final judging process:

Piers Black - Hand To Mouth

Andrew Crowther - The Wakefield Courier

Phil Davies - GIRL X

Karen Featherstone - The End of Sleep

Mike Heath - The Big Things

This year we received 232 submissions, with 25 picked for the longlist - including the 5 shortlisted above.

Sue Roberts, ��̳ Editor Audio Drama and The Verb said of this year's scheme "We were really impressed by the high standard and wide range of entries this year and are looking forward to working with the shortlisted writers over the next few months".

The winner of the Award will be announced in early April 2016.

A big thank-you to everyone who submitted a script this year and congratulations to all those longlisted and of course to the 5 shortlisted writers.

Find out more about the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award for Radio Drama

Watch two great advice videos from the team at ��̳ Radio Drama North:

General Script Advice

Advice specific to writing for Radio Drama

Writing '1977' for ��̳ Radio 4, and why it's about so much more than "a transgender woman in the 1970s"

2015-11-30T16:01:01+00:00

Editor's Note: Sarah Wooley's drama '1977' is broadcast on ��̳ Radio 4 on Thursday 3rd December 2015 at 2.15pm and on ��̳ iPlayer for 30 days. Her blog below about discovering the story of composer Angela Morley includes a few plot spoilers, so you may want to read it after listening to the drama.

Composer Angela Morley at work on a new score (Image courtesy of angelamorley.com)

I was away (crucially, without a television) when I first came across the story of Angela Morley. My son and I had been watching a DVD of the film Watership Down on an old computer. When the film ended (we were rather lean on DVDs) I decided to watch the ‘extras’. There was an interview with the film’s editor, Terry Rawlings and the director, Martin Rosen. They were talking about all aspects of the film and eventually got on to the subject of the score. Malcolm Williamson, then Master of the Queen’s Music, had been hired as the film’s composer. Williamson, a notoriously difficult and complicated man, was under extreme pressure; it was 1977, the Queen’s Jubilee year and he was over-commissioned. When the time came for him to hand over the score it was discovered that all that existed were two small sketches of music which amounted to no more than seven minutes of screen time. With an expensive orchestra and recording studio booked for the following week, the film’s conductor Marcus Dods turned to his old friend Angela Morley to try and help sort out the mess. Dods asked Morley to orchestrate Williamson’s sketches which she duly did with the help of another arranger, Larry Ashmore. In the meantime, Williamson left the country and at this point Terry Rawlings suggested to Rosen that Angela should be the person to take over as the film’s composer.

Malcolm Williamson, Master of the Queen's Music and original composer for 'Watership Down'

Now, at this point on the DVD extras I noticed that the conversation between Rosen and Rawlings began to stall a little. Rosen says that Angela, ’hadn’t worked in a long time out of choice’. I immediately sat up and took notice. What did he mean? Why hadn’t she worked? She was clearly brilliant. So I looked Angela Morley up and I found the answer.

Angela Morley was born in Leeds in 1924 as Wally Stott. Wally was a self-taught musician, joining the Oscar Rabin band in 1941 and then Geraldo’s band in 1942 as a saxophone player. Stott studied Geraldo’s orchestrations; he then took harmony lessons and composition with Matyas Sieber, and studied conducting with Walter Goehr. By the age of 26 he was able to give up playing to concentrate on composing and arranging. By 1953 he was appointed musical director for the British arm of Philips Records, arranging and conducting recording sessions for their contracted artists. At the same time he was writing and directing music for the long-running radio shows, Hancock's Half Hour (for which he wrote the famous tuba theme tune) and The Goon Show. He also composed scores for the films Peeping Tom (1960), The Looking Glass War (1969) and When Eight Bells Toll (1970).

Rebecca Root recording '1977' for ��̳ Radio 4

But throughout this time Wally, according to his friend, Max Geldray the jazz harmonica player, was plagued with ‘a lifelong mental struggle with gender identity’. After the death of his first wife and finding love with his second wife, Christine Parker, Wally make the difficult decision to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Wally said of Christine that ‘it was only because of her love and support that I was able to deal with the trauma and begin to think about crossing over that terrifying gender border’.

Wally had his surgery in Switzerland in 1970 and returned to England as Angela Morley. Angela continued her work with the ��̳ but she had concerns about how she would be treated by those who remembered her prior to her surgery. This led to her turning down the chance to appear in The Last Goon Show of All, a one-off TV special, and although she worked on scores for The Little Prince in 1974 and The Slipper and the Rose in 1976, she was, at least according to her IMDb entry, uncredited. Which leads us to Watership Down in 1977. Before 1970 Morley was well known for being able to write fast. She was so busy she would write the music for The Goon Show on the morning of each recording. So if you needed a composer to write a film score in three weeks because your first composer hadn’t delivered and had left the country, she was the perfect choice; according to her recollections, however (you can read them on Angela’s website), she was reluctant to take on the Watership Down job. She claimed this was partly because she wasn’t prepared enough and hadn’t read the book but I felt there was more to it than that. A film involves a premiere, interviews, galas and – if you are lucky – awards ceremonies. Sure she’d done all those before for the Slipper and the Rose, but as the film’s composer, this time very much credited, she’d have to face the world as Angela. There would be no hiding and this was 1977 – a whole 38 years before Caitlyn Jenner.

Listen to a clip of Rebecca Root as Angela Morley in '1977'

So it struck me that here was a chance to tell a story where the protagonist was transgender but where the focus of the story wasn’t actually on that. There is a helpful guide regarding tips for writing and editing transgender news stories on the All About Trans website. The last piece of advice is: ‘There are thousands of trans people in Britain: doctors, lawyers, artists, musicians, teachers, etc. Is this newsworthy? Surely there’s more to the story?’. In the case of Angela Morley there was indeed so much more to the story.

1977 is about lots of things. Yes it’s about a transgender woman in the 1970s but it’s also about the pressures of composing, the pressures of film making; it’s a midlife crisis play but above all it’s a love story. Christine and Angela moved to the US after the success of Watership Down. Angela went on to write music for Dallas and Dynasty, Cagney & Lacey and Wonder Woman. They lived in Arizona and it was here in 2009 that Angela died at the age of 84. Christine still lives there and we corresponded over email for the writing of 1977 because without her help the play wouldn’t exist. There are no biographies on Angela. Her story and her talent went under the radar. Max Geldray summed up Angela and Christine’s story as an extraordinary tale ‘of two people’s love and devotion […]which has gone far beyond the barriers of what most of us have faced in our lives’. The amazing thing is that most people don’t know about it. Maybe in a small way 1977 can change that.

Sarah Wooley is a writer for Radio, Television and Theatre. She has written plays for ��̳ Radio 4 about Andy Warhol, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, Erno Goldfinger and John Osborne.

Listen to '1977' on ��̳ Radio 4 on Thursday 3rd December and on ��̳ iPlayer for 30 days

Download and read the script for '1977' from our script library

Read an obituary for Angela Morley on the Telegraph website

The Angela Morley website

Find out more about writer Sarah Wooley on her website

Rebecca Root was the star of ��̳ Two's 'Boy Meets Girl', discovered through ��̳ Writersroom

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