Writing Articles

Unknown? Well, not so much that as a market that might be better known in writers’ groups. BBC Radio Drama, mostly on Radio 4 with some on Radio 3, turns out a staggering 468 single-play broadcasts a year.

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That’s a bigger new drama market than is found in all of the UK’s theatres combined, or on all the TV channels combined. And in the nature of the medium, it might be the drama market closest to your experience and vocation of writing prose fiction – a medium of words rather than of staging or cinematography. If you are the sort of fiction writer who warms to working a prose story up in the interchange of characters’ dialogue on the page, so much the better. And compared to some other markets it pays well, too.

So, what do we have? Afternoon Play every weekday: 260 45-minute dramas a year, probably the most promising market to break into because there are so many slots, though a trend here is towards turning some of these AP slots into original short-run drama mini-series in 45-minute episodes. Then there are Friday and Saturday Plays of 60 minutes each or 104 a year. Not forgetting, the 75-minute Woman’s Hour play, split into five 15-minute daily segments across the week, 52 weeks of the year.

Drama on 3 is Radio 3’s weekly drama on Sunday nights, anywhere from 75 to 90 minutes. For the dramatisation of published novels (that is, turning them into full radio drama in short-run serial episodes), we have the 60-minute Classic Serial on Saturdays, and three weekly serial dramatisations of lighter fiction in 30-minute episodes.

If you are keener on Light Entertainment sitcom writing, there are usually about two running 30-minute sitcoms a week and one other 30 minute comedy serial or series. If abridgment of published books rather than original drama writing is your bent, you can abridge a Book of the Week in five 15-minute episodes or a Book at Bedtime in five or ten 15-minute readings. (Abridging, a minor art-form in itself, is creative writing in reverse: you take out words rather than put them in!)

Study your market! Radio drama is the easiest market to study. It’s all BBC (too expensive for commercial radio) and mostly all on one network, Radio 4, with full listings given in Radio Times. Broadcast everywhere and on the Internet, it’s an easier market to follow than trudging round the country at vast expense to see what all the theatres are doing. Free if you don’t have a telly! Listen to as many plays as you can; weigh them up for range of subject matter and quality: they are a pretty mixed bag. Discover for yourself what you find most effectively put over by the radio medium in drama. Don’t go into this blind, as it were. If you think “I could do better than that!” you may be on your way!

So: you now have some backgrounding and on this basis you have written a play. There are three ways to submit material. The first is BBC WritersRoom (www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom) but don’t email scripts, send them in the post, to: BBC WritersRoom, 1 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JA. The second is via the various independent radio production companies; not all of these do drama. They are listed both at www.bbc.co.uk and in the annual Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, published by A & C Black. The third is via contacting a specific radio drama director whose work you may have heard and whose name appears with some regularity in Radio Times listings. Some of these are BBC regional drama directors producing for the national network and based at Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast, Manchester and Birmingham: you might be placed to gravitate towards one or other of these regional BBC production centres. Always send hard copy to any of these. BBC WritersRoom does not accept dramatisations or abridgments, only original plays.

Incidentally, by writing to BBC WritersRoom and enclosing an A4 s.a.e., you can obtain free a Writer’s Guidelines for the writing and layout of radio drama scripts: they like you to do this because it saves them a lot of time trying to explain to various writers where they have gone wrong at the outset. Theatres and TV or film companies tend to prefer scripts directed to them via play agents, but you really don’t need an agent when it comes to targeting the BBC Radio Drama Department’s market. If you are writing sitcom and light comedy scripts, these should go to a different department: Radio Light Entertainment – see its details on the BBC website. The usual Light Ent. practice is to send in a full first episode followed by short but informative paragraph breakdowns of each of the following episodes, in one package. Always aim your script in the right direction, otherwise you will experience only long delays of response. For instance, make it clear what the duration of your radio play is (45 minutes, 60 minutes) on the front cover so that it goes straight to the editor who considers plays for one slot or the other.

Some writers like to test out their work and ideas on script consultants, or else turn to script consultants to try to figure out why their play was rejected (rejection letters as you may know are not always the most helpful of documents when it comes to constructive criticism.) While there are dozens of script consultants on screenplays, not too many are into radio assessments.

Radio drama is, I believe, about the third most popular type of Radio 4 listening, after news and current affairs programmes. It is regularly followed by a few million UK listeners across the week and via the Internet it reaches around the world to many more – and in translation British radio plays will frequently turn up on stations in Germany, Scandinavia and many other countries. Radio is big time. But not so big that it freezes out all but hardened pros. It might turn out to be the medium for you.

The BBC Writers Room
http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/

Script Consultants
Script Success On-line
http://www.scripts-success.com/