Tag Archives: Radio 4

Radio 4: an addendum and an apology (of sorts)…

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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.

Today’s Radio 4 play…

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I wasn’t going to bother talking about this but, since people have been tweeting about “A Time To Dance”, the radio play I was involved with, in advance of it’s supposed airing this afternoon, I thought I ought to clarify a few things…

“A Time To Dance” was commissioned as a fake-news broadcast, created through improvisation, that would blur the lines between fact and fiction and experiment with a new way of telling a story (not that new, Orson Welles did it with War Of The Worlds in the 30s, but never mind that). That was the brief and that’s what we delivered to Radio 4 on Wednesday last.

On Friday morning, having presumably spent Thursday waiting to find out if they still had jobs after the cuts, Radio 4 REJECTED that version of the play, saying it sounded too much like a real news broadcast and that their listeners would be “confused”. That, obviously, was the point of the whole thing and why Radio 4 had asked us to use a real news anchor rather than an actor in the first place!

Rather than pull the play from the schedule, Radio 4 insisted (they can do that if you’re an independent company and reliant on them to make a living) that the show be extensively re-edited and new elements be recorded. We therefore spent the last two days doing that and, in addressing all Radio 4′s problems with the show, fatally compromised the original idea and turned a not-perfect-but-pretty-damn-interesting show into something of an incoherent mess.

That version was delivered to radio 4 last night. It is now one hour before the scheduled broadcast time and they still haven’t had the courtesy to call us up and tell us if they’ve listened to the new version or even if they are going to broadcast it!

ANYWAY, none of this is your problem, dear reader, but I thought you should know what it is you may or may not be about to listen to and that it doesn’t represent anything that anyone involved with the production intended it to be.

I hope you enjoy what’s there; the actors and technicians all did a great job and were a joy to work with and it’s not their fault that the whole thing got shat on from a great height by people who lack courage, conviction or even common courtesy.

If “A Time To Dance” is broadcast this afternoon, it’ll certainly be the last time you hear anything with my name on it on Radio 4.

Was that a sigh of relief?

Julian