Yesterday I wrote a blog piece explaining the difficult birth of “A Time To Dance” and bemoaning the BBC attitude to its audience; namely that they thought the audience couldn’t tell the difference between fact and fiction and that, unless we scaled back the fake-news aspect of our play, there would be massive complaints.
It turns out the BBC were right (it took a long time to get my fingers to type that sentence!)
We DID scale back the news-aspect of the play, we scaled it back more than you can possibly believe, and we protested every single one of those cuts as loudly as we could.
The resulting play was a weird mix of drama and fake-news that I didn’t think would work because it couldn’t possibly fool or unsettle the audience as much as it was intended to.
Boy, was I wrong. We got a seemingly record number of complaints on the BBC duty log for an Afternoon Play, all of them (barring the one about how we were providing a mind-control manual to Satanists) from people who had heard Robin Lustig’s voice and believed whole-heartedly that there was a dance epidemic spreading around the world and that this was clearly the dawn of the End Times!
On the strength of that evidence, I have to believe that my preferred version of the play would have had people running like lemmings into the sea. That would have been great for me, but I do understand how it would have caused a problem within Radio 4 and, in the current climate, been potentially destructive to BBC radio drama.
I still don’t love how the BBC handled the situation and I’m still not sure how I feel about the finished product, but I was clearly wrong about how the audience would react to it.
I also thought that this new version would disappear without trace, for not being sufficiently different from the run-of-the-mill radio drama. I thought no one would listen. I thought no one would talk about it.
Wrong again. 12,000 hits and counting on Listen Again in the last 24 hours. That’s more, apparently, than most radio drama gets in a week.
So what do I know? See? I don’t know why you all listen to me…
If you haven’t heard “A Time To Dance” yet, it’s on listen again HERE for another 6 days.
I work for the School for Movement Medicine (which teaches a form of ‘trance dance’) and I received a phone-call 2.45 on Monday afternoon from a woman who very concerned about what was happening and asking if there was anything we could do to help. It took me about 3 minutes to talk her down and convince her that the radio broadcast she had tuned into was a drama. I’ve now listen the paly and think it is brilliant (and yes I would have them dancing into the sea) and am recommending it to all our clients. Well done!
Haha, what a great story! Glad you liked the play.
Glad you enjoyed it!
The song is “Blue Sky Falls” by Sweet Billy Pilgrim (@sweetbillyp on Twitter) from their forthcoming album Crown and Treaty, which I’m afraid isn’t out until February 2012!
I caught the whole play – something I would never normally do, but was stuck in traffic due to a closed M25.
Sorry to say it, but the balance was about right. You say that had there been more reportage then it would have appeared more “real”, but that’s not the case; the fact is that the listener is fooled up to a point, beyond which they aren’t. If there had been more reportage then it might – MIGHT – have changed the point at which that happened. And of course, it wouldn’t have affected anyone who heard the trailer.
However, the point at which the drama bit was “interrupted” by Robin Lustig totally had my somach in knots, even if for about 10 seconds. That might not sound like much but 99% of output wouldn’t do that at all. And if you wanted more realism, then the guests would need to be a bit deeper. And I was amazed no-one mentioned Torchwood, the X files or something similar, which I’m sure would get mentioned in real life.
I’m only saying this becasue of your rather unneccessary bit of apology; this was without doubt the best drama I have ever heard on the radio, full stop, bar none. I reel genuinely saddened by the last line of your previous post, because I would love to hear more in this vein.
Thanks for the comment. I’m not sure how resolute I am about not working for Radio 4 – I’m sure I’ll get over it!