The History of Radio Drama And Notable Broadcasts

Radio drama is a style of storytelling that is broadcast on the radio. Radio drama contains no visual aids so solely relies on dialogue, sound effects and music alone to aid the listener to imagine the visuals in there own minds. 

Radio drama gained a huge popularity since it's first stages of development in the 1920s. In the 1940s, It was a leading player in the international entertainment industry until the release of television in the 1950s. Since then radio drama started to loose popularity and in some countries has never regained a large audience since. Some older radio broadcasts are still available to listen to via online download, archives or museums.

Today radio drama has a very little existence in the United States of America. However the United Kingdom still have largely popular radio drama shows such as Little Britain and The Archers. The BBC produces and broadcasts hundreds of new recordings each year on Radio 3, Radio 4 and BBC Radio 7. Radio 4 in particular broadcasts drama broadcasts in the afternoon in forms of dramatical plays and also a one off Friday evening play. BBC Radio 3 broadcast dramas on Sunday evenings and also reserve a slot for experimental drama called The Wire. Radio 7 usually broadcasts older archived programs however sometimes broadcast dramas in the categories of Thriller, Comedy and Science Fiction. 

The first recorded english spoken radio drama was titled "A Rural Line on Education" which was broadcast on the american radio station "KDKA" in Pittsburgh in the year 1921. One of the first drama broadcasts in the United Kingdom was the BBC's "Danger" by Richard Hughes in 1924 which was about a group of people who become trapped in a coal mine in wales. The first most influential radio broadcasts was the French "Marémoto" also known as "Seaquake" which was about a ship sinking before finally revealing that the characters were actually actors. This broadcast was later translated for both German and English broadcast by 1925. It was set to be aired on Radio-Paris on October 23, 1924 but was banned from being broadcast on french radio until 1937 due to the government believing that the SOS messages would be mistaken by coast guards as real distress signals. 

Americas most famous radio drama to be broadcast was the Orson Wells's "The War of the Words," in 1938 which was a recording of the H. G. Wells novel, This broadcast amazingly convinced many listeners that aliens from mars were actually attacking earth in several parts. The broadcast in total was 60 minuets long and consisted of simulated news bulletins which scared listeners into belief that martians had landed on earth. The broadcast was made more believable by cutting out all advertising breaks during its runtime. After the broadcast  there was alot of negative response and widespread anger as it was described as being cruel and deceptive. In the history of radio drama this piece could be considered to be one of the most famous pieces of all time. 


Another famous science fiction radio drama broadcasted a while after "The war of the Worlds" was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which first broadcast on the 8th of March 1978 until the 25th of June 2005 and is still broadcasted sometimes today. It broadcast a total of 26 episodes and was created by "Douglas Adams" who was an English writer from Cambridge. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a Science Fiction-Comedy which was broadcast in both England and eventually America, The show won several awards including The Sony Award in 1979. 


Followed by "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy came The Twilight Zone which was an adaptation of the classic television series, It's first broadcast was in October 2002. The Twilight Zone was broadcast first in america and can be listened to online. Many of the stories are based on the same scripts Rod Serling had written for the original Twilight Zone series that aired on the television in the 1960's 

 

Since the 1st of January 1951 until present "The Archers" has been broadcasted on the radio with over 16,000 episodes, created by Godfrey Baseley "The Archers" is a 12 - 15 minute Soap Opera based in the United Kingdom, It was first broadcast on the BBC Light Program followed by the BBC Home Service and now BBC Radio 4. The Arches is now one of the world's longest running radio soaps, about people living the country life in England. 
Set in Ambridge in a fictional county called "Borsetshire" where the middle-class "Archers" family own "Brookfield Farm." The show is a story of the Archers life and daily dealings. 


My final radio drama to note was titles "Mrs Dale's Diary"  which is known as the first significant BBC radio drama. It was first broadcast on the BBC Light Programme on the 5th of January 1948 and later moved over to Radio 2 in 1967, It came to it's finale in 1967 on April the 25th.  A different episode was broadcast every weekday afternoon with a repeat the next day. 


Mrs Dale was a doctor's wife, who wrote a diary of her day to day middle-class life, They lived in a fictional suburb called "Parkwood Hill." The program was considered to be the first British radio drama to include a homosexual character acceptably with a leading part. It was very bizarre to have a gay character in Mrs Dale's diary as at the time of broadcast, homosexuality was still illegal in the United Kingdom.

Here is a short audio clip I have found on Youtube of Mrs Dale's Diary.

Radio Drama Production Diary: Log 14 - Thursday 4th March 2010

This thirsday we had a radio listening party during our lesson where we all got together to listen to each others work and give feedback and opinions on what was good and what needed to be improved, another group of students also came into the lesson to give feedback.

We presented ours and got a good collection of good feedback however we needed to finish of the ending with a "Next time on..." style of ending, followed by our "Production details" for example who plays who and who wrote the script. We have taken these points into consideration and will work on them in our next session.

Below is our most up to date recording of our drama peice.



NOTE: If you are trying to listen to this recording behind a firewall or college network, you might encounter problems as the host may be blocked!

Radio Drama Production Diary: Log 15 - Thursday 11th March 2010

Today in our radio media lesson I began work on designing my double page radio guide for our radio drama piece, I have started using Adobe InDesign and started using my skills in my AS Year.  My color schemes is black and green and I have began to put the names of my radio stations onto my work. 

Cues and Links within our Radio Drama Recording

A definition of cues and links:

Cues  Links - How you fill the bits between scenes, intro's and credits

When writing our script we had to think about how the scenes, intro and outro would all fit together nicely for example when we were creating our radio drama we decided to add a musical intro to the drama to explain the cut between our "Previously" scene and the current episode. Also at the end of scene one we used a fade and slight pause to explain to the audience that another scene is starting in a different location with a different selection of characters.

Here is an extract of our script to show how we used cue's:

"Scene One ends with fade"

"Cue few seconds of silence to show scene change"

"Fade in Scene 2# INT. LA BOOSH BAR - Night. Jazz music is playing quietly in the background, the sound of a busy bar with various sounds of drinks being poured, general conversation and the sound of Abbey's chair being pulled from it's table"

As you can see from the quote above, we have thought carefully about piecing our drama together to flow easily through to the end without breaks and confusion. This helps the listener understand that the scene, location and characters have changed.

Before our drama started we used a technique that explains briefly to the listener what happened in the episode before the one that is about to be played. We used cues to show the listeners the cut between the previous episode description and the current episode by adding a brief pause followed by some theme music. Here is a quote from our script to show you what it looked like:

"Previously on Transgression....."

"Cue a couple of seconds of brief pause."

"Begin theme music."

This helps to break our drama up slightly and to inform our listeners that our episode is starting.

Radio Drama Micro Elements

Voice: Due to our script being set in the style of Film Noir we decided that we would have to use American accents to ensure our radio drama sounded correct as if we had just used our typical English voices it would not all tie together as our story was set in Detroit. We did however acknowledge that this could have been a huge risk as it could take the seriousness away from the story line and turn it into a mockery... We still however went ahead with the decision and the outcome was relatively successful. We spent two sessions at the beginning of our assignment practicing our voices to ensure they were correct and level all the way through the recording, this was difficult as sometimes we let our voices slip as we went through our scripts whilst recording, eventually we achieved our goal and perfected our voices. Another problem we had whilst recording our voice was page turns whilst using our scripts and loud students outside of the recording room. The recording room was only sound proof on one side of the room and was next door to the bathrooms, so when somebody used the hand dryer in the bathroom we were forced to stop recording. We went through our script four times to ensure we had each scene complete for editing.

Silence: The main use of silence in our recording was to indicate the change between different scenes, Using a moment of silence between scenes was a good technique to indicate to listeners that the scene was changing, This was important for us as there was three different locations used in our episode that ranged from a back alley to a busy jazz bar. I played Chief Justice in the Radio Drama and during the second scene in the office where I was being grilled by my boss about spending to much time on the case I was told to go home and leave the case alone, to show that I wasn't happy about my boss's decision I used a pause between my dialect and said "Ok Chief...(Silence)... Cya Tomorrow" This was a good idea as it brought out my feelings and emotion on the subject. 

Music: The use of music in our recording was used in small amounts however still played an important role in perfecting our final piece, we used a short clip of music combined with sound effects as our theme tune to create a link between our "Previously" section of our recording and the current episode, this was important as it explained to the listener that the current episode was about to start if they were not interested in the brief catchup. we found our theme tune music in the royalty free music archive owned by our college. We also acquired a royalty free piece of jazz music from the college archive for our "La Boosh Bar" scene where the chief’s daughter and the Villain "Scooner" are making conversation. This was used to create a Jazz bar style atmosphere along with sound effects of people talking in a group over the top of the music.

Sound Effects: Collecting sound effects was one of the most time consuming tasks out of all the micro-elements of our drama recording, Thankfully the college radio editing rooms had a large library of sound effects and ambient sounds to browse through that were available to use. Some times we found it difficult to find a sound effect so we used a program for the mac called "Audio Hijack Pro" which aloud us to record streaming audio off of the Safari internet application, this meant we could record sound effects straight to .MP3 off of the web and import them into Soundtrack Pro for implementation into our recording. The last thing we had to do with sound effects was to record our own, we struggled to find a suitable matching "Door Open/Close" sound effect for our recording so we decided the only way to get the sound effect we wanted was to record it ourselves. Our college technicians provided the equipment and software we needed to record our sound effects. I believe we used our sound effects extremely effectively, they sounded realistic and were put in the right place at the right time, there were times in our recording where we thought our sound effects worked amazingly for instance in the first scene (Alley Way) we used a section of traffic with a siren driving by, we cut the effect up and turned the levels down so it sounded as if it was in the distance, we also used a doppler effect on the siren so it sounded as-if it was coming from one side of the street, past the characters and down the other side of the street. 

I felt we have mastered the techniques when using Micro Elements within audio, If we were to create another recording I think we should have focused more on recording our own sound effects to make a more unique sounding piece of work, overall I am happy with our outcome.