RADIO GA-GA

‘Do you sing?’

The bulky woman came across to speak to me.  She had a plaster cast on her right wrist.

‘No.’

‘Only you have such a strong voice.  I thought you might sing.’

‘Madam, I once heard a sports commentator remark that one of the top female tennis players has a shriek like a seagull falling down a well.  That equates to the quality of my singing.’ 

She walked away, disappointed, and took no further interest in me.

She and I were attending a workshop run by quite a famous playwright, about how to write drama for radio. There were fifteen of us at the workshop, not including the playwright.  I sat next to a small, trim, middle-aged woman, who looked not unlike Judy Murray, the tennis coach and mother of Andy.  I introduced myself.

‘Do you write plays?’  I asked.

‘I write poetry’, she said demurely.  ‘I’ve published three anthologies of poetry.  I’ve a book launch here a week on Monday.  Do you write poetry?’

‘I dabble.’  I didn’t tell her I hadn’t got much further than ‘There was a young woman from Cork/Who mixed up her knife and her fork/When dinner was served/she became so unnerved/She thought O’Shaughnessy was a stork.’

The playwright commenced proceedings by telling us that he was writing a series of radio plays under the name of ‘Lowlights.’  They were to be set in a barber’s shop.  That seemed to set the tone for the evening.

‘The great problem with radio is exposition,’ he said.  We looked puzzled. ‘You should set your play in a railway station, or a dentist’s waiting room.  People can identify with those places.  There’s no point in setting it in the middle of a field.  The listener won’t know where you are.’

I looked across at my fellow students.  They were a weird-looking bunch, apart from the aforementioned poet next to me, who was rather smart.  Her name was Katherine Tyldesley. The men were generally old, unfit, and dressed like Worzel Gummidge before he’d had a chance to visit the dry-cleaners.  The women were much more presentable, except the plump lady with a plaster cast, who was dressed in the fashion of a 1970s living-room. 

The quite famous playwright gave us useful tips on character, especially what he called ‘verbal tics.’  ‘Make ‘em sniff, or snort, or give them a stutter, anything to differentiate one character from another.  Make ‘em do as normal people do – finish other people’s sentences, go off at tangents, say ‘um’ and ‘er’ a lot, and tail off in mid-sentence themselves.’

I was already going off the idea of writing radio drama, if I had to replicate the nature of the conversations I have had with various people over the years.

The playwright told us about Aristotle’s five acts of drama – exposition, conflict, crisis, climax and catharsis.  He told us to get exposition (that word again) out of the way early: ‘I’m at the battle of Waterloo and it’s a rainy Monday in March.’ 

He told us it was our job to surprise the audience.  Finally, he set us a test.  In pairs, we had to create the ‘who, where, when, and what’ around two people having breakfast, one of whom knew something the other did not, that would change both of their lives for ever.  We had a mere ten minutes to come up with a professional answer. I was paired with the slim and smart poetess, Katherine.  I could see that the other six pairs (due to the fact that there were 15 of us, one pair was a trio) were going to struggle mightily with this.  I was destined to toil a little myself. Luckily, Katherine had a clear idea as to how to move forward.

‘I’ve spent some time in Kenya,’ she said. ‘How about if two men were at breakfast in a Nairobi hotel during the Mau-mau uprising, and both had to catch a plane that afternoon.  One of them knew that there was only one seat on the plane, and that the Kenyan government was going to close all of the airports after that plane left.  The play would be about his machinations in ensuring that he was the one that caught the plane.’ 

It certainly beat my suggestion, which was that a husband and wife were sitting having breakfast and the husband opened a letter which stated he’d won £100,000 on the premium bonds and he was already making his plans to abscond with Doreen from the typing pool.

The playwright went round the pairs.  Three of them hadn’t got past the ‘who’, two had misheard the question and had come up with entirely spurious answers.  The youngest pair, two girls, came up with some drivel about a man on a plane with a bomb strapped round his waist, and then I boomed forth with our Kenyan oratory. 

The playwright considered for a moment, then shook his head.

‘Much too complicated’ he said. ‘Far too many threads and strands.  The audience wouldn’t be able to make head or tail of it.  First rule of writing drama – keep it simple.’ 

I felt deflated.  Katherine just shrugged her shoulders.

‘What I would have done in this situation,’ the playwright said, ‘Would have been to invent a scenario whereby a man and his wife were sitting at breakfast, and the husband opened a letter stating that he’d won a huge prize on the premium bond or the lottery.  You could have endless possibilities with that.’

As I said goodbye to Katherine and wandered out into the cold night, I had already decided to give up writing drama for radio and would concentrate on poetry instead.  By the time I’d got to the bus stop, I’d already concocted ‘There was a man from Tralee/Who found it was quarter to three/In a panic he ran/Straight into a fan/And now he’s Mother Macree.’  One regret was that I would never know what Katherine thought about it.