This week on the Sonic Society, Jack brings a little late holiday cheer with more great Deck the Halls released this past summer. In this summer special, Emma, Jackie, and Stu head out to Trip’s family lake house for some rest and relaxation… but the cabin holds a secret far more gruesome than bulk sour mix.
The great actors of The Flintstones (minus Mel Blanc) talk fondly of their love of radio drama and how they worked on the titular animated series in the same way. Alan Reed, Fred Flintstone, specifically talks about how radio is his favourite medium. And what could we say in reply?
Yabba Dabba Doo!”
We often forget the absolute magic of the audio story. If we go back to our childhood, we can remember being read to- even if we couldn’t see the page. Our imagination fills in the worlds that are drummed up through sound in a way that the visual medium could never accomplish. If you don’t believe me, try this experiment some time. Turn on a television show on TV and make sure you can’t see the picture. You’ll be able to follow along in most cases to the story. Then try the reverse. Watch the show without sound, and you may get the broad strokes, but more likely you’ll miss out on what is actually happening.
Still don’t believe me? Ask David Tennant and Kenneth Branagh
It’s always a joy when someone else uncovers a secret pleasure so many of us have enjoyed.
Devon Strolovitch from PRI identifies Sorry, Wrong Number as one of the gems of the Golden Age of Radio Drama. Our only beef is the line: “Often, even during the golden age of radio, these were formulaic, poorly produced stories.”
I’d say that that the Golden Age produced no more formulaic, poorly produced stories than there are today. Every age has its stinkers and its gems. Regardless, have a wonderful listen to this amazing tale one more time!
Rebranding Audio Drama as “Fiction Podcasts” seems to be all the rage. Some time ago we called these “podficts” for short. Regardless, it’s nice to see the CBC taking the medium seriously again.
Check out Fiction podcasts are giving new form to the old art of the radio drama and maybe give them a nudge that the Sonic Society has been in their backyard for 15 years 🙂
Long before our multi-screen, multi-platform world existed, people used to huddle around a radio to listen to the latest episode of a drama series. Today, this old art form has been given new life in the form of podcasts.
Fiction genres — like drama or horror — are a booming area in the podcast universe, which so far has been dominated by reality-based offerings featuring true crime, news or interviews.
That they’re mobile and often free has also helped bring them to a larger audience than ever before.
New York-based podcast company Gimlet Media says fiction has untapped potential for audience growth in the podcast arena.
“Fiction really is our big bet for, like, groundbreaking new content that doesn’t sound like anything else,” says Nazanin Rafsanjani, Gimlet’s vice-president for new show development.Nazanin Rafsanjani, Gimlet Media’s vice-president of new show development, says fiction genres are ‘groundbreaking new content’ for podcasts. (Alice Hopton/CBC)
The bet has already paid off: Gimlet’s first scripted series,Homecoming, proved so popular that Amazon turned it into a Golden Globe-nominated TV series starring Julia Roberts and Canadian actor Stephan James.“What’s exciting about fiction is that you can tell any kind of story … if you have the right talent writing it and creating it.”
Gimlet also produces the macabre tale The Horror of Dolores Roach and a comedy, Sandra, starring Kristen Wiig.
“The way you’d want to sit down and watch a movie or get super engrossed in a television show, that is how our fiction team really thinks about the projects that we take on,” says Rafsanjani.
Homegrown theatre
A Toronto team has taken Canadian plays and turned them into serials on the PlayME podcast, bringing homegrown talent to listeners around the world.“We want playwrights to become a household name,” says Laura Mullin, co-creator of PlayME and co-artistic director of Toronto’s Expect Theatre.
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After 20 years in the Canadian theatre industry, Mullin and business partner Chris Tolley set out to put a bigger spotlight on Canadian writers and talent.“We just wanted to have an opportunity to take the great work that we were seeing and let a larger audience [hear] it,” she says.
Since its launch in 2016, PlayME has received more than one million downloads in more than 90 countries, and has ranked as high as #2 in the Arts category on the iTunes chart.
A recording session for What a Young Wife Ought to Know, for the CBC Podcast PlayME. Chris Tolley, left, with playwright Hannah Moscovitch, centre, and Laura Mullin. (CBC/Evan Mitsui)
“We’ve heard everything from people telling us that they’re listening to learn English [to] people that are going out to [see] shows because they had heard a play,” says Mullin.She hopes programmers and artistic directors are also listening.
The PlayME catalogue, which is now on CBC’s roster, features a diverse range of stories from coast to coast, with 60 per cent of the writers female and 60 per cent people of colour.
‘Intimacy’ of radio drama
Hannah Moscovitch, a Dora Award and Trillium Book Award winner, says podcasts make Canadian theatre much more accessible because audiences don’t have to be local or shell out for pricey tickets.“This way people can access the work all the time, whenever they want. I want people to be able to hear my work.”
A series of letters she discovered inspired her to write the story about a young wife trying to get legal birth control in Ottawa in the 1920s, which has been turned into What A Young Wife Ought To Know.
“I loved the intimacy of radio drama,” she says. “I’m happy that it’s coming back in this way.”
As we gain deeper insight into the producers, writers, and sound engineers that brought us some of the powerful shows of the past, in our ongoing attempt to understand this medium we look at this little clip of the great director/producer Jack Johnstone talking about live radio drama and specifically how a flub was handled on Superman!
This Spectator article wants to point out to those enamoured with the latest craze of podcast-madness, that radio hasn’t exactly been overwhelmed by the downloading RSS feeds.
Podcasts, too, have yet to master drama; it will surely become established, challenging the corporation to maintain its commitment to what is for many of us the USP of BBC Radio. Roy Williams’s modernisation of John Wyndham’s 1957 sci-fi novel The Midwich Cuckoos, on Radio 4 at New Year, was a chilling reflection of the original. Directed by Polly Thomas with Jenny Sealey and her theatre company Graeae, which is led by disabled actors, the drama suggests a link between the cuckoos of Wyndham’s novel and that sense of being different, ostracised by a society that does not understand you. Some of the cast members are profoundly deaf, which you can hear in their voices, some are black, adding levels of meaning to the text. The sound design (by Eloise Whitmore) and specially composed music by Oliver Vibrans added to the strange atmosphere. This was properly creepy.
Check out the detailed article by Kate Chisholm for more!
Recently, our Sonic Echo team have been talking about the classic Nightfall horror suspense series from CBC Radio in the eighties. Bill Howell, the senior producer had a fascinating take on the challenge of getting an audience in Radio Drama. From the Theatre Research in Canada Journal. 1990’s article Bill Howell from Canadian Radio Drama in English: Prick Up Your Ears:
According to CBC producer Bill Howell, however, such numbers do not really constitute an audience (even though, of course, the word ‘audience’ derives form the Latin verb audire, ‘to hear’).
They represent individual listeners, simply because there can be no interaction between them and the performers. The experience necessarily is subjective and internalized.
The play is created in the imagination of the listener. This is both the weakness and the strength of radio drama. It precludes the communal experience, the interaction of stage event and audience response so vital to live theatre; but it creates a condition of intimacy, a personal voice in the ear, which live theatre cannot replicate.
Bill Howell considers radio theatre a kind of paradox: ‘It comes out of a sense of community, but finally radio drama is a community of two’ – the radio whistling into the listener’s ear. Most importantly, it develops the art of listening – listening as active and participatory. And in this age of visual stimulation, listening has become almost a lost art.
Rarely is the whole concentration focused on sound. The general assumption in our hurried society is that listening is secondary and passive; it fills in the background during more important activities such as ironing and washing the dishes. The result is that most of us hear very little. We tend to hear what we want to hear, what we think we hear.
We become closed to new perceptions. Only the strident and shocking sounds cut through – what television announcers now call ‘sound bites.’ Radio drama, however, is foreground listening.
It works only if it commands the whole attention of the audience, and this is a difficult thing to do.
Almost forty years later and the challenge is still real, Mr. Howell. Thank you.
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