British Radio Dramaturgy and the Effects of the New Conservatism

ORE Open Research Exeter TITLE British Radio Dramaturgy and the Effects of the New Conservatism AUTHORS Stanton, William JOURNAL New Theatre Quarterly DEPOSITED IN ORE 19 January 2009 This version available at http://hdl.handle.net/10036/47713 COPYRIGHT AND REUSE Open Research Exeter makes this work available in accordance with publisher policies. A NOTE ON VERSIONS The version presented here may differ from the published version. If citing, you are advised to consult the published version for pagination, volume/issue and date of publication William Stanton British Radio Dramaturgy and the Effects of the New Conservatism This essay, which is informed by the author’s own practice as a playwright working in the medium of radio drama, looks at some effects of the enforced merger of radio with TV drama to create a ‘bi-media’ department at the BBC, and considers the evolution of commissioning policy since the imposition of the internal market under the Director Generalship of John Birt (from 1992 to 2000). Considering radio drama, after Adorno, as a producer in the culture industry, he suggests that the neo-conservatism of the 1980s, as described by Habermas, is a significant factor in understanding current commissioning practices and the dramaturgy of new realism in some radio drama. William Stanton is a Lecturer in Drama at Exeter University, where he teaches and researches writing for performance and intercultural performance practice through a research/practice link with the University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil, where he has an AHRB award for anew project in 2004. He is also a writer of fiction and plays for stage and radio. His most recent play for BBC Radio 4 was Dead Line in 2002, and his Route 23 is forthcoming. IN 1971, Martin Esslin, who was then head of theatre companies, acting as both receiver BBC radio drama, wrote in the first volume and initial ‘filter’ for the hundreds of scripts of Theatre Quarterly ‘The Mind as a Stage’, in submitted by known and unknown writers which he described the function and scope of each month. All of these were commented on the medium. Discussing the diverse work of by teams of readers, and those writers who the national theatre of the air, he reminded us showed some potential for the medium were that a Saturday Night Theatre production helped to develop their craft in a dialogue (normally 90 minutes), repeated the follow- with script editors and producers – ‘a verit- ing Monday afternoon, reached ‘an audience able university of dramatic writing’, as Esslin of between one and a half and two million put it. He was rightly proud of the BBC’s people – the equivalent, that is, of a run of commitment to both new and established between 1,500 and 2,000 sold-out perform- writing, and the dramaturgical credentials of ances in a theatre holding a thousand people – the system – particularly in commissioning, a run of more than five years!’ (1971, p. 6). and in script and writer development – were But radio drama’s reach was far broader impressive. than this: the audience for a Radio 3 ‘mino- Citing John Arden, Harold Pinter, Giles rity drama . may be no larger than 50,000 Cooper, Willis Hall, Henry Livings, Tom people for a single performance, still the Stoppard, and many others, Esslin emphas- equivalent of a respectable run in a small ized the importance of the partnership over theatre, but far too small to be considered the first fifty years of radio drama between commercial in television’ (1971, p. 7). The writer, dramaturg, and director in bringing scope of the medium, then broadcasting 500 significant new writing to the public. But to 700 radio plays a year, was huge; and the because it was a national theatre, BBC radio variety of the work, in terms of new writing drama broadcast a diversity of work in trans- and production, was a mark not only of the lation – part of a policy for ‘each generation flexibility and power of the medium, but also growing up to hear the bulk of classical drama, of its organization. from the Greek tragedians and Aristophanes The radio drama script unit functioned to the Elizabethans, Restoration comedy, the like the literary department of many national nineteenth-century realists, Ibsen, Chekhov, ntq 20:1 (february 2004) © cambridge university press doi: 10.1017/s0266464x03000332 59 Strindberg, Shaw, right down to Brecht and monwealth Office. Independence, just as the Beckett’ (1971, p. 6). notion of public service, may sometimes be Such scope was also possible because the problematic in this context, even though medium was and remains able to mount pro- World Service producers believe in their edi- ductions far more cheaply than the theatre or torial freedom. television. A 90-minute radio play with a large cast could be (and still is) recorded in Frankfurt Dystopia 1 a week, with a further two or three days of editing; and we may see this, among other Theodor Adorno’s tirades against the work- things, as a highly cost-effective form of sub- ings and effects of culture as part of industry, sidy. The medium was broad and flexible particularly in his book The Culture Industry and its ability to develop scripts and there- (1991), are directed at culture throughout the fore writers was a mark of the clearly defined modernist period, particularly regarding dramaturgical function of the script unit. ways in which modernist work has become Esslin wrote his article over thirty years incorporated by late capitalism. Adorno, Max ago, and celebrated in particular the devel- Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and latterly opment of radio drama from the 1950s. His Jürgen Habermas have argued that incorpor- somewhat utopian picture did not mention ation is not just a matter of ways in which censorship, however – the fact that the Lord cultural products are determined by markets, Chamberlain’s office had full control of the but of a fundamental change in aesthetics. licensing of stage plays for public perform- Late-capitalist evolution, according to this ance until 1968. This, inevitably, must have theory, results in the erosion of modernist two- had its effect at the BBC. As Steve Nicholson dimensionality; and the Frankfurt school has points out (citing a speech by the Prime produced a complex, far-reaching, and (for Minister Stanley Baldwin to Lord Reith and some) controversial critical discourse on the the retiring directors of the BBC in 1926), ‘in ways in which this process works. understanding the role of censorship, what is This raises questions about what art can allowed – and by definition encouraged – is achieve; whether Marcuse is right to charac- as important as what is banned’ (2003, p. 291). terize the development of late capitalism as Baldwin’s speech had been about white producing one-dimensionality (1968); and, supremacy, and we should remember that indeed, whether resistance to the process is his attitudes are those of the leader of an possible. This in our present context raises imperial power looking down on native the question of whether it is possible for radio populations. He was also addressing a BBC drama to sustain in any way some sort of Director General who had seen it as his duty liberal-conservative accommodation between to put the Corporation at the disposal of the a broad notion of public service broadcasting government in its propaganda war against and the demands of markets. the General Strike (by the inferior native According to Martin Esslin, BBC radio population at home) in that same year. drama once went its independent way, pro- It is important to note that the crucial viding high quality and diverse radio theatre underlying theme in Nicholson’s detailed for large audiences. He does not provide the documentation of censorship is that, when sort of socio-economic profiling that the BBC dealing with powerful institutions, people now gathers, and this is significant partly learn to produce – and to write – what they because profiling was not accorded such think is likely to ‘get through’. In other significance then. We feel that Esslin and his words, they learn to operate forms of self- colleagues knew both their existing audi- censorship that are invisible and of course ences and also those they wanted to encour- extremely difficult to quantify. This, for age; and the tenor of his article suggests that instance, comes into relief at the BBC World he might have held, in response to the Service, which is funded not by the licence Frankfurt critique, that the public service fee but directly by the Foreign and Com- function of radio drama, with its commit- 60 ment to drama from Aeschylus to the present, The drive of the market impacted on radio was resistant to a Marcusian one-dimen- commissioning policy, too. Without a script sionality precisely because of its variety of unit, and with a new tier of commissioning genres and its policy of developing new editors working to Kate Rowland, the new work that did not necessarily accord with head of radio drama, who worked to James ‘house style’. Boyle, head of Radio 4, who was appointed by John Birt, commissioning policy became amore opaque process, at least from the Effects of a ‘Market Economy’ writer’s point of view – and in my experi- The first major change in John Birt’s period ence, for many producers too. Early on, the as Director General of the BBC (1992–2000) 90-minute play, which until then had held was to establish an internal market. In radio, three slots on Radio 4 per week, was decreed the script unit was disbanded and replaced dead. by a system called ‘producer choice’, by It was difficult to determine the cause of which producers needed to ‘sell’ projects to death, but the evidence of focus groups and commissioning editors, who would decide other (unavailable) audience research seems what kinds of drama would be made in each to have been a significant factor.

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