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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #43: TV On The Radio

Had a nice old time on Sunday listening to BBC Radio 4's adaptation of John le Carré's SMILEY'S PEOPLE, as part of their current campaign to adapt all of the eight novels featuring George Smiley in chronological order.

For me, listening to BBC Radio is a daily routine so ingrained it goes beyond mere habit. Even when I'm not in Britain, I still stream the BBC on my computer everyday, listen to the world news on the BBC rather than any American TV news outlet, and what I especially like to keep up with is the dramas and comedies. Before I started working in film or comics, I started out writing for the BBC. I had four radio plays produced and broadcast by both Radio 3 and Radio 4 before I'd graduated university, so I'm biased.

Radio drama may be taken for granted in Britain, but it's still a bigger deal than most people realize. There's a radio drama on every day of the week in different slots. There's a captive audience of tens of millions of listeners in cars, offices, homes, hospitals. Some of the biggest names in writing got their start in radio plays: Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter… It's easier for them to get prestigious productions off the ground without the delays you see in TV or movies because they need to fill airtime every day of the year, and that's just on Radio 4. There's still the World Service, Radio 3, Radio 7 and even music stations Radio 1 and 2 occasionally broadcast dramas and comedies. You may assume that most radio plays are either middle-of-the-road dramas and shaggy dog stories about ordinary people facing slightly unusual situations, all very comfy, but then the BBC also tends to go for more challenging material alongside those.

A few weeks ago, there was a Radio 4 adaptation of Ian Fleming's GOLDFINGER, which adapted the plot of the book rather than the movie, starring Ian McKellen as Goldfinger and Toby Stephens as James Bond. Rosamund Pike played Pussy Galore with the dodgy American accent you come to expect from Brits. There's an interesting kind of postmodern metatextuality here since Stephens and Pike were both in the last Brosnan Bond movie DIE ANOTHER DAY. Also interesting to hear Stephens pitch his Bond as a man from 1959 instead of the 21st Century, which was the original version after all.

Back in the 1990s, Radio 1 even ran a radio dramatization of BATMAN: KNIGHTFALL and THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN, adapting the comics pretty directly. These productions won awards. There's no great snobbish discrimination here. They could run these while also running adaptations of THE MASTER AND MARGARITA and Dostoyevski's THE IDIOT without the pressures of softening or censoring of ideas that Hollywood tends to insist on.

In 2002, Radio 4 ran a multipart adaptation of Philip Pullman's HIS DARK MATERIALS trilogy with all the anti-Catholicism and atheism intact without any problems or outcry, unlike the pressures that killed Hollywood's chances of making a movie beyond the first book.

In 2008, Sebastian Baczkiewski wrote a series of four radio played called PILGRIM, about a man cursed with immortality in the 12th Century who now wanders modern England as an occult investigator, encountering old mythic wood gods, faeries, Joseph of Aramethia, lost werewolf girls and millionaires who collect supernatural creatures. The scripts were clever, atmospheric, steeped in English folklore, and reminiscent of books by Alan Garner and British horror fiction, without the glib, teen-friendly cuteness of recent genre shows like BUFFY or DEMONS. They were pretty much the best HELLBLAZER dramatizations you could imagine, with the licence number shaved off. It's a shame no one's thought to launch a TV series version of PILGRIM. And then the BBC also produced TORCHWOOD radio plays to tide the fans over until TORCHWOOD: CHILDREN OF EARTH came along.

I've always had a soft spot for radio drama, and the BBC's producers are the ones who take the care to craft the best in the world. It takes a particular skill to write radio plays, and for the producers and engineers to introduce the sound cues and effects correctly to create a physical world that you can't see. The writer doesn't get to describe action or visuals. You have to rely purely on sound and dialogue to create a room, a place, an entire world and the people interacting in it. There's a skill to writing dialogue for radio that feels like it's being spoken by real people and not the "Hey, look at the battle up on that hill" or "Ouch! I am being hitted by a fist!" variety. Simple actions can be implied with sound and some dialogue, but not elaborate actions. Fight scenes don't generally work on radio because what you're left with is just a bunch of grunts and shouts. You can't go around having people making long speeches all the time, because that becomes dull. You have to learn about the rhythm of speech, the back-and-forth, how to slow it down, how to speed it up. There is very little fat or clutter in radio production. It's the actors in the studio in front of microphones with the sound engineers running the FX on cue. Writers are treated very well in radio drama. The producer, who also directs, works closely with the writer to hone the script, trim, edit and revise it to its most refined draft before production. No one is allowed to change a word in the final script without the writer's say-so. It's one of the best training grounds a writer could get starting out. You're not going to get rich but the pay is decent, and any beginner in Britain who wants to actually get some training in writing and get paid at the same time could do a lot worse than writing a radio play and sending it to the Beeb. It's a lot more productive than busting your hump trying to get your comics written and noticed for very little pay, and everything you learn can be used later when you decide to write comics and screenplays.

Hmm, and now I read in today's Guardian that Germaine Greer bonked Fellini. Someone should write a radio play about that. Might have to wait till everyone's dead first, though.

Tuning in at lookitmoves@gmail.com

© Adisakdi Tantimedh

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