Showing posts with label radio drama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label radio drama. Show all posts
Friday, January 27, 2012
The commissioning process: New piece on The View From Here
Thursday, June 10, 2010
New Salt Twitter Reading Group & how to preserve radio plays
I'm thrilled that Too Many Magpies is to be the first in a new Twitter Reading Group for Salt books, beginning right now. You can read about it here on the Salt blog, where you can also listen to a podcast of me reading from the novel. Next week there will be an interview with me, and at the end of the month there will be an open Twitter discussion about the book, so anyone on Twitter will be able to have their say (eek!). (Just search on Twitter for #SaltReadingGroup.) If you'd like to take part and haven't read the book yet there's still time to do so (it's not a long book!). (And you know where you can buy it, eh?)In other news, yesterday I had a letter from someone calling herself a 'senior lady' saying that her recording of my radio play 'What Mummy and Daddy Do' had worn out (!) and could she possibly buy another from me to leave to her family after her days. This was a lovely accolade, but then I wondered where she could have got my address and realized it must have been from the BBC (which would have been her first port of call), and they must have destroyed their own copy - if they ever kept one in the first place, since the play was produced by an independent company. Makes me realise once more that I need to carefully hoard my own collection of my radio plays and make copies (and somehow covert those on tape cassettes to CDs: another reminder of the way that changing technology can lead to the loss of archives). Maybe I could start selling them... Must look at the contracts!
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Radio schlock
On Friday in the Guardian Zoe Williams wrote this:
It's the same everywhere I go. Yesterday I went to a party and as usual I was asked about my writing, and whenever I happened to mention that I hadn't written radio for a while, people relaxed and said: 'Oh yes, cos it's all crap nowadays, isn't it?'
Honestly, it's enough to make me think of taking radio off my CV...
Zoe Williams thinks the problem is that the themes chosen are too ambitious - (pandemics, Shoah, etc) - too ambitious anyway for Radio 4 which she associates unquestioningly with 'schlocky dialogue'. (Cringe.)
Well, I think it's the commissioning process, which took over at the end of the nineties. As I've said before, when I first started writing radio plays you wrote what you wanted, sent it in, and if they liked it they produced it. And there were real respect and encouragement in radio for good writing, which was rewarded each year with the now defunct Giles Cooper Award. But things changed, the BBC restructured and the dreaded Commissioning Rounds came in, and the 'Market' became quite frankly more important than the writer or the writing. Commissioning Editors decided on trends of the moment (in themes and style), and writers and directors had to pitch ideas within those parameters, following instructions as far as possible but much of the time second-guessing. (It was round about then that I heard from someone in the know, I can't remember who, that Tom Stoppard's agent contacted BBC Radio to say that Stoppard would like to write them a play and was told to tell him to send in a proposal, and they'd decide if it was suitable.)
If you did get commissioned, there were plenty of other obstacles to overcome. When I wrote my comedy series The Circle, each episode as I wrote it had to be read by not just my director, but a script editor, an executive producer and the head of drama, all answering to the Commissioning Editor and all coming back with separate comments according to criteria I hadn't guessed at and which now hit me like a bombshell. 'We want heart-warming drama,' they told me. 'Get rid of the irony, please.'
Get rid of the irony? But I had won prizes for my irony! My writing is irony!
Well, I was lucky with my producers: we talked and they understood and all was right in the end. Radio commissioning changes all the time, and I don't know the current situation, but you do sense that those big themes are being thought up in boardrooms. And I do know that writers write best when they're writing from the heart and not by numbers imposed from above.
It's all very well calling Radio 4 drama inexplicably bad, but someone must be able to explain it. So I am going to make a stab at this. And then later, I am going to stab the person who commissions these plays.
It's the same everywhere I go. Yesterday I went to a party and as usual I was asked about my writing, and whenever I happened to mention that I hadn't written radio for a while, people relaxed and said: 'Oh yes, cos it's all crap nowadays, isn't it?'
Honestly, it's enough to make me think of taking radio off my CV...
Zoe Williams thinks the problem is that the themes chosen are too ambitious - (pandemics, Shoah, etc) - too ambitious anyway for Radio 4 which she associates unquestioningly with 'schlocky dialogue'. (Cringe.)
Well, I think it's the commissioning process, which took over at the end of the nineties. As I've said before, when I first started writing radio plays you wrote what you wanted, sent it in, and if they liked it they produced it. And there were real respect and encouragement in radio for good writing, which was rewarded each year with the now defunct Giles Cooper Award. But things changed, the BBC restructured and the dreaded Commissioning Rounds came in, and the 'Market' became quite frankly more important than the writer or the writing. Commissioning Editors decided on trends of the moment (in themes and style), and writers and directors had to pitch ideas within those parameters, following instructions as far as possible but much of the time second-guessing. (It was round about then that I heard from someone in the know, I can't remember who, that Tom Stoppard's agent contacted BBC Radio to say that Stoppard would like to write them a play and was told to tell him to send in a proposal, and they'd decide if it was suitable.)
If you did get commissioned, there were plenty of other obstacles to overcome. When I wrote my comedy series The Circle, each episode as I wrote it had to be read by not just my director, but a script editor, an executive producer and the head of drama, all answering to the Commissioning Editor and all coming back with separate comments according to criteria I hadn't guessed at and which now hit me like a bombshell. 'We want heart-warming drama,' they told me. 'Get rid of the irony, please.'
Get rid of the irony? But I had won prizes for my irony! My writing is irony!
Well, I was lucky with my producers: we talked and they understood and all was right in the end. Radio commissioning changes all the time, and I don't know the current situation, but you do sense that those big themes are being thought up in boardrooms. And I do know that writers write best when they're writing from the heart and not by numbers imposed from above.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Learning to adapt
Giles Foden writes in today's Guardian about the dangers of having one's fiction adapted for the screen. It's a funny business, as I've said on my other blog. As a reader I would say I don't like screen adaptations: I usually try never to see one before reading a book, yet if I watch one afterwards I'm always frustrated by the gap between the director's vision and my own. I haven't read Foden's novel The Last King of Scotland, but on this occasion I was dragged along, reluctantly, to see the film. I was bowled over - rarely has a film made such a lasting impact on me - but I know now that I'll never be able to read the book without its images and those actors in my head.
As a writer, though, it's a different story. Someone comes along and offers you a big bag of money to turn your novel into something which will make it a hell of a lot more famous than it ever was before - or in, my case, famous in a way it never was. I had had bad luck with my second novel, Body Cuts. Halfway through the editing process my editor at the small publishing house left to pursue her own novel career, and the publisher failed to tell me, or to make clear to her replacement where we were in the editing process, and as a result the book went to press without my final editing. The reason for such mix-ups suddenly became evident. Weeks before the book was due out the publisher was bought up by another, and although my book had been announced in the trade press, it failed to appear. When it was eventually published, no new announcements were made in the trade press by the new publisher, and not long after that the original publisher's fiction list was remaindered.
In the meantime, however, during the short time that book was in the bookshops, the TV director John Glenister happened to pick it up, got hooked and immediately decided that he wanted to adapt it for TV. How cool was that? How could I refuse such a chance of resurrection? My usual reservations about screen adaptations went shooting off into the ether.
In fact, in the end that adaptation didn't happen - people at the BBC had moved on, artistic and funding policies had changed - but as I had been working on the adaptation with John, I took it to a Channel 4/arts-board screenwriting scheme, and here my reservations dropped back down from the sky. My God: the changes I was expected to make!! My main male character should be a different sort of person, my female character's mother ought to die!!! Needless to say I soon dropped the whole idea, and contented myself with salvaging from this last experience insights for my satirical (and entirely fictional) story, 'The Shooting Script', which may be included in my forthcoming collection from Salt, Balancing on the Edge of the World.
We haven't yet decided which stories will go in this collection, but one which probably will is 'Power', which looks at the stresses on children of quarrelling parents through their contrasting voices (previously published in Power [Honno]), a story I adapted as a radio drama. It was the second time I had adapted my own fiction for radio: earlier I worked on my first novel, The Birth Machine. Both times I worked with the director Michael Fox and both times I was given free rein to adapt my work in ways which allowed me to stay as true to the original as I wished. I have to say that adaptation for the verbal, non-visual medium of radio is a different thing altogether: I don't feel in any way that the transformations stole the souls of the original fictions in the way screen adaptations so often seem to do.
As a writer, though, it's a different story. Someone comes along and offers you a big bag of money to turn your novel into something which will make it a hell of a lot more famous than it ever was before - or in, my case, famous in a way it never was. I had had bad luck with my second novel, Body Cuts. Halfway through the editing process my editor at the small publishing house left to pursue her own novel career, and the publisher failed to tell me, or to make clear to her replacement where we were in the editing process, and as a result the book went to press without my final editing. The reason for such mix-ups suddenly became evident. Weeks before the book was due out the publisher was bought up by another, and although my book had been announced in the trade press, it failed to appear. When it was eventually published, no new announcements were made in the trade press by the new publisher, and not long after that the original publisher's fiction list was remaindered.
In the meantime, however, during the short time that book was in the bookshops, the TV director John Glenister happened to pick it up, got hooked and immediately decided that he wanted to adapt it for TV. How cool was that? How could I refuse such a chance of resurrection? My usual reservations about screen adaptations went shooting off into the ether.
In fact, in the end that adaptation didn't happen - people at the BBC had moved on, artistic and funding policies had changed - but as I had been working on the adaptation with John, I took it to a Channel 4/arts-board screenwriting scheme, and here my reservations dropped back down from the sky. My God: the changes I was expected to make!! My main male character should be a different sort of person, my female character's mother ought to die!!! Needless to say I soon dropped the whole idea, and contented myself with salvaging from this last experience insights for my satirical (and entirely fictional) story, 'The Shooting Script', which may be included in my forthcoming collection from Salt, Balancing on the Edge of the World.
We haven't yet decided which stories will go in this collection, but one which probably will is 'Power', which looks at the stresses on children of quarrelling parents through their contrasting voices (previously published in Power [Honno]), a story I adapted as a radio drama. It was the second time I had adapted my own fiction for radio: earlier I worked on my first novel, The Birth Machine. Both times I worked with the director Michael Fox and both times I was given free rein to adapt my work in ways which allowed me to stay as true to the original as I wished. I have to say that adaptation for the verbal, non-visual medium of radio is a different thing altogether: I don't feel in any way that the transformations stole the souls of the original fictions in the way screen adaptations so often seem to do.
Friday, December 08, 2006
Lost Literature
You can't help wondering what literature, both written and potential, is lost through lack of outlets. Commenting recently on my other blog, nmj relates how she started out as a short-story writer and got an agent on the strength of her short-story writing. However, she discovered, it wasn't the stories themselves the agent was interested in, and she was immediately persuaded to write a novel, and her short-story writing went by the board.
My own experience was the same, and I'm sure we are not the only two. It seems to me that the AL Kennedys and Ali Smiths are only the exceptions that prove the rule: Ali Smith, indeed, has stated in an interview that she feels she was helped towards publication of her first collection by things extraneous to her (marvellous) prose: the fact that she was Scottish, and the fact that she was lesbian.
Once upon a time short stories were all I ever really wanted to write. I loved the form with its special poetic yet muscular compression. Once I had published several stories in literary magazines, I began hoping to publish a collection. I went on an Arvon course and to my delight and gratitude my tutor Martin Booth sent my stories off to his agent, who immediately rang me. (And there are people in the blogosphere insisting that you don't need assistance and contacts to get taken up!) But this agent said the same to me as nmj's did to her: we have to have a novel, it's impossible to sell short stories. So I wrote a novel (The Birth Machine) - not a very long one that first time, more of a novella really; it took me a while to ease out of the short form - and then another (Body Cuts).
I didn't stop writing stories; I just went on publishing them in magazines. But then the magazines began to die away, and there didn't seem any point in writing them any more... And my novel publishers got bought up, the usual story, and the list I was on was remaindered. And, just as I found myself out in the cold, the commercialisation of publishing accelerated, and, after a beginning when all doors had opened before me, getting fiction published seemed no longer the easiest thing in the world. And since the doors in radio were flung wide open - I had written a play on the off-chance and it had been broadcast and won a prize - I became a radio dramatist instead.
Of course you don't stop altogether, you can't keep the urge down. And this week a collection of short stories won the Guardian first book award. Small presses like Comma, Salt, Elastic and Leaf are springing up to specialise in short stories. There are doors swinging open again.
My own experience was the same, and I'm sure we are not the only two. It seems to me that the AL Kennedys and Ali Smiths are only the exceptions that prove the rule: Ali Smith, indeed, has stated in an interview that she feels she was helped towards publication of her first collection by things extraneous to her (marvellous) prose: the fact that she was Scottish, and the fact that she was lesbian.
Once upon a time short stories were all I ever really wanted to write. I loved the form with its special poetic yet muscular compression. Once I had published several stories in literary magazines, I began hoping to publish a collection. I went on an Arvon course and to my delight and gratitude my tutor Martin Booth sent my stories off to his agent, who immediately rang me. (And there are people in the blogosphere insisting that you don't need assistance and contacts to get taken up!) But this agent said the same to me as nmj's did to her: we have to have a novel, it's impossible to sell short stories. So I wrote a novel (The Birth Machine) - not a very long one that first time, more of a novella really; it took me a while to ease out of the short form - and then another (Body Cuts).
I didn't stop writing stories; I just went on publishing them in magazines. But then the magazines began to die away, and there didn't seem any point in writing them any more... And my novel publishers got bought up, the usual story, and the list I was on was remaindered. And, just as I found myself out in the cold, the commercialisation of publishing accelerated, and, after a beginning when all doors had opened before me, getting fiction published seemed no longer the easiest thing in the world. And since the doors in radio were flung wide open - I had written a play on the off-chance and it had been broadcast and won a prize - I became a radio dramatist instead.
Of course you don't stop altogether, you can't keep the urge down. And this week a collection of short stories won the Guardian first book award. Small presses like Comma, Salt, Elastic and Leaf are springing up to specialise in short stories. There are doors swinging open again.
Monday, October 23, 2006
Rhyme or Reason
Yesterday I wrote on my other, critical blog about an article in the Observer by Jason Cowley on our current era of winners-past-the post cultural prizes. Afterwards I fell to thinking about the time I didn't actually win a glitzy prize but may as well have done, and got to experience how it felt.
The occasion was the Sony Radio awards. I had just had my first radio play, Rhyme or Reason, produced. One morning Robert Cooper, my producer, rang up and said that something wonderful had happened: my play had been nominated for the Best Production category, and Harriet Walter, who had played my protagonist, for Best Actress. I was invited to the dinner and ceremony at the Grosvenor Hotel, and since Harriet was in LA and wouldn't make it, would I collect her award if she won?
Crikey. Help. But yes!!! Yes!!
So off I went on the train, worrying about what I was wearing, worrying about getting up on that stage, rehearsing the speech I might have to make, almost shaking with nerves the whole way in fact, in through the doors of the hotel, down the stairs (behind Ned Sherrin, in fact) and into that vast ballroom filled with glittering tables. I'm not sure why I didn't actually faint.
And I couldn't sit with Robert, the only person there I knew; as a nominee (nominated for Best Production for two plays) he'd been placed at a table near the front, and I was stuck right at the back with a table of unnominated BBC employees. They had no idea of course who I was, and I was so small and black in my dress and my nervousness, so removed and silent in my agony (what if Harriet won?) that they clearly decided to leave me alone. I listened a little, understood that some of them were producers whose names I knew, but most of the time I blanked out. Needless to say, I hardly ate a thing.
Then the ceremony. I followed the programme, my heart going like a goose in a bag. 'Best Production.' Robert Cooper! 'Best Actress.' My heart flapped up my throat. 'Harriet Walter. Unfortunately, Harriet can't be here this afternoon, but the writer of the play, Elizabeth Baines, is here to collect her award for her.'
Funny things happen at moments like this. Not for nothing are they done in slow motion in films. That's exactly how they seem to happen. I stood, and in the space of what must have been only seconds - I had to get across that vast floor, between all those staggered tables - I saw in minute and leisurely detail the way the people at my table turned and looked at me in astonishment, the changing of their expressions to realisation and then delight.
In his article, Jason Cowley writes of how winning a prize can change someone's life as a writer, and it's true: even though I hadn't actually won a prize - it was Robert and Harriet who had won - in that moment I went like Alice through a hole into another dimension, out of literary anonymity into recognition, out from 'struggling' into 'established' and 'successful.'
That whole vast room clapping and cheering as somehow, remembering my performance skills, I got quickly across it. Jane Asher kissing me (she was presenting the prizes), then down off the stage to a barrage of flash bulbs. And back to the table and everyone there waiting to hug and kiss me. 'Congratulations!' they kept saying. 'But it's not me who's won!' I said. 'Rubbish!' said the woman with the long hair who had turned out to be the producer Enyd Williams. 'No one gets nominated for a play that isn't great!' 'It's your win too,' they kept telling me. 'Make sure you put it on your CV!'
And then they called me to go with them in their taxi for a celebration at the BBC.
And afterwards? Well, as a radio writer I was made. One unfortunate result was that Robert - Sony-award-winning radio producer - quickly moved off to TV and Dublin, but the prize made it easy for me to get another radio producer. 'Anything you write, I'll produce it!' said Sue Hogg, who did indeed produce my next play. (Though there came a time of course when BBC Radio embraced Marketing, and no producer could say such a thing.)
But you can't help thinking how much luck is involved. What if that play hadn't fallen into Robert's hands? I had entered it in a Radio Times competition, and it hadn't won that - wasn't even a runner-up - and it could have fallen into oblivion if someone running the competition hadn't made the decision to pass it to Robert. I could have taken it as a message that I couldn't do radio plays and abandoned the whole idea... What if Robert had been less ambitious, and hadn't bothered getting a well-known and respected actress to play the part (bound to get more serious attention then)? What if he'd been less good at marketing and hadn't created a series of linked plays of which my play was one (an innovation at the time, that got a lot of attention)? What if, what if... As various people have commented, not least Grumpy Old Bookman, people take prizes as serious measures, but there's much about them that's random and not a lot of rhyme or reason.
The occasion was the Sony Radio awards. I had just had my first radio play, Rhyme or Reason, produced. One morning Robert Cooper, my producer, rang up and said that something wonderful had happened: my play had been nominated for the Best Production category, and Harriet Walter, who had played my protagonist, for Best Actress. I was invited to the dinner and ceremony at the Grosvenor Hotel, and since Harriet was in LA and wouldn't make it, would I collect her award if she won?
Crikey. Help. But yes!!! Yes!!
So off I went on the train, worrying about what I was wearing, worrying about getting up on that stage, rehearsing the speech I might have to make, almost shaking with nerves the whole way in fact, in through the doors of the hotel, down the stairs (behind Ned Sherrin, in fact) and into that vast ballroom filled with glittering tables. I'm not sure why I didn't actually faint.
And I couldn't sit with Robert, the only person there I knew; as a nominee (nominated for Best Production for two plays) he'd been placed at a table near the front, and I was stuck right at the back with a table of unnominated BBC employees. They had no idea of course who I was, and I was so small and black in my dress and my nervousness, so removed and silent in my agony (what if Harriet won?) that they clearly decided to leave me alone. I listened a little, understood that some of them were producers whose names I knew, but most of the time I blanked out. Needless to say, I hardly ate a thing.
Then the ceremony. I followed the programme, my heart going like a goose in a bag. 'Best Production.' Robert Cooper! 'Best Actress.' My heart flapped up my throat. 'Harriet Walter. Unfortunately, Harriet can't be here this afternoon, but the writer of the play, Elizabeth Baines, is here to collect her award for her.'
Funny things happen at moments like this. Not for nothing are they done in slow motion in films. That's exactly how they seem to happen. I stood, and in the space of what must have been only seconds - I had to get across that vast floor, between all those staggered tables - I saw in minute and leisurely detail the way the people at my table turned and looked at me in astonishment, the changing of their expressions to realisation and then delight.
In his article, Jason Cowley writes of how winning a prize can change someone's life as a writer, and it's true: even though I hadn't actually won a prize - it was Robert and Harriet who had won - in that moment I went like Alice through a hole into another dimension, out of literary anonymity into recognition, out from 'struggling' into 'established' and 'successful.'
That whole vast room clapping and cheering as somehow, remembering my performance skills, I got quickly across it. Jane Asher kissing me (she was presenting the prizes), then down off the stage to a barrage of flash bulbs. And back to the table and everyone there waiting to hug and kiss me. 'Congratulations!' they kept saying. 'But it's not me who's won!' I said. 'Rubbish!' said the woman with the long hair who had turned out to be the producer Enyd Williams. 'No one gets nominated for a play that isn't great!' 'It's your win too,' they kept telling me. 'Make sure you put it on your CV!'
And then they called me to go with them in their taxi for a celebration at the BBC.
And afterwards? Well, as a radio writer I was made. One unfortunate result was that Robert - Sony-award-winning radio producer - quickly moved off to TV and Dublin, but the prize made it easy for me to get another radio producer. 'Anything you write, I'll produce it!' said Sue Hogg, who did indeed produce my next play. (Though there came a time of course when BBC Radio embraced Marketing, and no producer could say such a thing.)
But you can't help thinking how much luck is involved. What if that play hadn't fallen into Robert's hands? I had entered it in a Radio Times competition, and it hadn't won that - wasn't even a runner-up - and it could have fallen into oblivion if someone running the competition hadn't made the decision to pass it to Robert. I could have taken it as a message that I couldn't do radio plays and abandoned the whole idea... What if Robert had been less ambitious, and hadn't bothered getting a well-known and respected actress to play the part (bound to get more serious attention then)? What if he'd been less good at marketing and hadn't created a series of linked plays of which my play was one (an innovation at the time, that got a lot of attention)? What if, what if... As various people have commented, not least Grumpy Old Bookman, people take prizes as serious measures, but there's much about them that's random and not a lot of rhyme or reason.
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