The Charm of Audio Drama

While almost every radio station can be accessed online these days, one of my favourite purchases from the last five years is a pocket DAB+ radio. I find it freeing to use a standalone device with few distractions that doesn’t use much battery.

That first radio was made by Pure, but it stopped charging some time ago. A local repair shop was physically unable to remove the cover, while the manufacturer declined to make an out-of-warranty repair. As such, I bought a refurbished one made by Majority. I hadn’t heard of this brand before, but it’s just as good as any other I’ve used.

I typically listen to BBC stations, particularly Radio 1, even though I’m more than a decade older than their target demographic. The attraction is that most contemporary music is upbeat, and I’ve found it increasingly difficult to listen to slow music over the last few years.

But I don’t want to focus on music output in this entry. I’m here to talk about speech. The corporation is a leading producer and broadcaster of scripted audio drama. Most of its output can be found on BBC Radio 4 Extra, sandwiched between comedy and occasionally poetry.

One drama I caught recently was Credit Risk by R D Wingfield, a name that might be familiar to fans of A Touch of Frost. I didn’t specifically tune in for this, but I was intrigued by how a gang infiltrated the offices of a credit card company to siphon off payments. I also didn’t specifically tune in for Double Income No Kids Yet, featuring David Tennant as half of the only childless couple in a friend group, but I’ve so far listened to two episodes.

Such audio drama tends to have a high repeatability potential. The Tennant drama has aged reasonably well since its original run from 2001 to 2003. Credit Risk, by contrast, is somewhat fossilised in 1977, but it’s a fascinating historical snapshot of when many card payments were done manually, and by characters called ‘Mr Shadbolt’ and ‘Sales Lady’.

I haven’t even mentioned long-running soap The Archers, although I don’t listen to that.

For those who have only watched TV dramas, there are some immediate differences in how the dialogue sounds. On the screen, writers aim for a more naturalistic style, since the setting can be made obvious through vision. In audio drama, the scene needs to be set with words, tone and/or sound effects.

On account of this restriction, the dialogue can sound somewhat clunky, even though the production team will aim to reduce the word count as much as possible.

Although there are plenty of podcasts featuring audio drama, there isn’t a commercial UK station with comparable output. Any speech stations tend to focus on news, current affairs, debate and/or sport.

I wonder whether there’s a gap in the market to add regularly scheduled audio drama. Such programmes are typically made on a shoestring budget, and I don’t foresee much trouble finding a sponsor to offset at least part of the cost.

In the meantime, however, it looks like the BBC has a practical monopoly on broadcast scripted drama.