Tag: CBC (Page 1 of 3)

CBC Rediscovers Audio Drama

December 30, 2018 / / 0 Comments

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.

Trends, surprises and must-hears: 13 podcast experts weigh in on 2018
Step aside, Shakespeare: PlayME adapts modern plays for the podcast crowd
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.”

The CCBJS Archives

September 1, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Concordia University has become the archive for Canadian audio drama- especially the CBC.

Centre for Broadcasting and Journalism Studies Archive has an incredible collection. Just check what their page details:

CBC Radio Dramas

Since 1975, the Centre has been the official legal depository of the radio drama scripts and ancillary drama materials of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  The CCBS Collection now includes scripts from the dawn of radio in Canada in the 1930s to the present day. The Centre’s Archives collected and established by Howard Fink house more than 20,000 original Canadian radio drama scripts and several hundred sound versions of the most important of these productions, as well as all the surviving ancillary documents. Three extensive annotated bibliographies have been placed online for the radio dramas (1925-1961, 1962-1986 and 1987 ongoing).

Radio is a unique medium, and though it may be overshadowed by newer media as a means of communication, it has nonetheless played a central role in the evolution of Canadian and global communication and society. We maintain that the radio drama scripts contained in our archive are important artefacts of the cultural and political development of Canadian modernity itself.

CBC Radio Drama and Canadian Society

As may be gathered from the publications and research grants for the Centre’s original research program (Jackson, Fink, Vipond, and Nielsen), our focus is on the sociological-literary-historical and communications analysis of English-Canadian radio drama, in its national and regional production centres, concentrating on the creative products, their creators, the administrators, and their networks. The principal objective of this research program is to explicate English-Canadian cultural development as revealed in the historical and literary development of CBC radio drama and Canadian Broadcasting policy. Moreover, we learned from contractual negotiations, our copyright and legal agreements with the CBC, and research experience with the radio drama archive that the archive needs to be very carefully preserved for current and future generations of researchers.

Research Fellows have been researching and publishing on the theme of Canadian radio drama and society since 1975. Select examples of projects include:

  • Centralization and Decentralization of Canadian Broadcasting in Western Canada (John Jackson, Howard Fink, Mary Vipond, SSHRC grant, 1992-1995).
    This research represented the last phase of a long-range study programme built around CBC radio drama productions. It originated in the SSHRC funded project 410-89-007 (“Canadian cultural development, central & regional voices:  The case of CBC English-language radio theatre”), which concluded on August 31, 1991. In the proposal for 410-89-007 we indicated that it was our intention, in the long term, to pursue a study of the development of radio theatre in Western Canada focusing on Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton and Calgary as regional production centres, and requested funds for a short-term study of Winnipeg as a major regional centre. Having completed our work in Winnipeg, we were able to follow through with research in Regina, Calgary/Edmonton, and Vancouver. Continuing with our original objective, we documented the centralization process via western radio theatre as an aspect of the broader process of the centralization of English-Canadian cultural production. The inquiry centred on the tension between regional and central voices in the development of public broadcasting in Western Canada.
  • An Instrument of War: The CBC in World War II (Mary Vipond, SSHRC Standard Research Grant, 2001-2004).
    This project, which will result in a book-length manuscript, focuses on the propaganda role of the CBC during the war by examining its censorship activities as well as programs such as the news service, war-related talks and dramas, and special events programming.  Most of the research was undertaken in Ottawa at what is now Library and Archives Canada; the chapter on war dramas will be based on scripts held at the Centre for Broadcasting Studies.  Graduate students in History assisted in the collection of secondary source material and in constructing a database of CBC wartime programming that will be analyzed to assess the trends in the frequency and popularity of such programs.
  • A comparative Critique of Seriocomedy and Social Context of Broadcasting in Quebec and Canada (Greg Nielsen, SSHRC Standard Research Grant, 1998) and The CBC and Radio-Canada Seriocomedy Project (Greg Nielsen, John Jackson and Mary Vipond, 2001).
    The research program began with comparative analyses of differences between French speaking Quebec and English speaking Canadian nationalisms as seen through the study of public broadcasting with a focus on Toronto and Montreal production centres. This research focused on public broadcasting and the cultures of urban laughter. It demonstrated that the CBC Broadcast Center provides production of an imaginary Canadian community mostly managed but not exclusively produced in Toronto’s downtown core. A French Quebec sense of a different national and urban imaginary in mass culture form also has its origins in the public broadcasting headquarters in Montreal.

We continue to archive CBC radio Drama and update the conditions of the archives to make them accessible to researchers. Our archival research continues to develop (Vipond on the history of Canadian Broadcasting; Nielsen on French and English language seriocomedies) but we also began broadening the research scope toward North American (Jackson and Rosenburgh on radio and audience reception) and global studies of broadcasting and other broadband media such as online newspapers.  (Fink on the Diniacopoulos tapes, Nielsen on newspapers and culture of cities—Montreal, New York, Dublin, Toronto, Berlin). By expanding the field of our research object to include the public cultures of broadcasting after modernity in a variety of locales.

Howelling Wisdom

August 24, 2018 / / 0 Comments

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.

Sonic 211: Summer Parlour- Could Be

July 19, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Tonight Richard Frohlich from Texas Radio Theatre joins the Amigos for an exploration into the most geopolitical radio show in the history of the Sonic Society, Norman Corwin‘s “Could Be”.

Have a listen yourself and consider whether you too could be part of a better future world!

Mentioned in the discussion:
H.G. Wells
Things to Come- The Movie
 The Anatomy of Tyranny- Timothy Snyder (Ideas)
Dan Carlin
Solarpunk
Afghans life expectancy

Note: Please excuse the poor audio as technical difficulties on skype are often unexpected

A Grand Actor- Chris Wiggins

February 25, 2017 / / 1 Comment

As a young lad just developing my love for Audio Drama, one of the fun CBC shows I listened to was Johnny Chase- Secret Agent of Space. It ran weekly for a time on Saturdays. Johnny fought all kinds of evils and even set a kind of Battlestar Galactica like fleet quest to look for a new Earth for humankind to settle on. But no hero is complete unto themselves and Johnny had Dante- his insufferably brilliant computer voiced by the incredible Chris Wiggins. Chris had the kind of singular voice most actors dream of. While voice acting was certainly a skill, it wasn’t his only. He also played the father in the Canadian series of Swiss Family Robinson in the seventies. Furthermore you might remember him in his later years in the Canadian X-files like series Friday the 13th.

Since Mr. Wiggins had settled in my old hometown of Fergus in his retirement, I tried through many channels and his personal email to arrange an interview for the Sonic Society to no avail. Apparently, his health has not been the best in the last ten years.

According to a recent post from Bloody Disgusting Mr. Wiggins passed yesterday at the age of 87. What a huge loss to Canada, and to drama. According to the article:

Of course, we’re barely scratching the surface of Chris Wiggins’ contributions to the entertainment industry by focusing on “Friday the 13th: The Series.” He has over 142 acting credits on his resume, appearing in countless television shows and TV movies dating back to 1956. Just a small handful of the shows Wiggins starred in and lent his voice to include “Mighty Thor,” “Spider-Man,” “Swiss Family Robinson,” “Star Wars: Droids,” “The Care Bears Family,” “The NeverEnding Story,” and even the animated series “Tales from the Cryptkeeper.”

Rest in Peace good sir, we barely knew you.

 

Someone Sonic

January 9, 2017 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been a listener of CBC Radio all my life. I miss the heady days of Peter Gzowski, Vicki Gabereau, Michael Enright and Alan Maitland duo and Lister Sinclair‘s dulcet voice and gentle hand on the wheel.

CBC has gone through a lot of changes, some of them great, some not so. The not so great has been the loss of radio drama which has been stellar through out the years. But maybe some forms of podficts are coming back. Thanks to NPR’s famous Serial, CBC has started a couple more innovative story telling shows. The latest is Someone Knows Something. This documentary first person style series- like Serial- follows a tale all season about a missing person- unsolved cases. The first season it was Adrien McNaughton. Season two it’s the story of the disappearance Sheryl Sheppard.

The episodes are compelling like only crime mysteries can be. That they are true, brings out the very iciness in the veins. Let’s hope that someone does know something and these mysteries can be solved.

 

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