Apparently the BBC is reformatting a bunch of its programming, particularly the radio drama, and, well, people are getting the vapours about it. This Graun piece suggests that, yeah, people are complaining cos killing off the last drama program on Radio 3 looks bad, but it’s probably less bad than it looks:
In 2021, BBC Radio revamped the bulk of its arts programming, the greatest casualty being Saturday Review on Radio 4. Outcry followed, as today. Yet Radio 4’s other arts coverage was commensurately bulked up, with the addition of new shows This Cultural Life and Screenshot. Radio 4’s highest-profile arts offering, Front Row, has gained 30 minutes a week and a weekly slot focused on Scottish arts. Meanwhile, Radio 3’s forthcoming programming, notably a 40-part series on modernism in music, shows a commitment to classical but no sign of dumbing down.
What lies behind this shift, I am told, is the director general Tim Davie’s obsession with “brand purity”. Gone is the magazine mix of Radio 3, with its mandate to balance highbrow speech programming with highbrow music; we are moving instead to the “clarity” of a Radio 3 dedicated to classical and jazz music, and a Radio 4 dedicated to speech. Speech programmes that enhance Radio 3’s “music brand”, such as Music Matters, will stay. Two other intellectual panel programmes, Free Thinking and The Verb, have already made the move from Radio 3 to Radio 4.
However, what this means for radio drama at the BBC could be another thing:
Where does this leave the legacy of audio drama at the BBC? Stripped of the security of the 90-minute format, for sure. The BBC is eager to reassure us that audio drama continues on Radio 4: as yet, however, it offers only drama slots of 45 and (sometimes) 60 minutes.
Over at The Stage, the critic David Benedict recently bemoaned such lengths as unfit for drama. “Forty-five minutes of drama is a horribly unsatisfying length,” he writes, “like a book too long to be a short story, but not long enough to be a novel.”
Unfortunately that piece quoted there is behind a paywall that even 12ft.io couldn’t pull down, so I don’t know what else brother Benedict says in it, but… what a stupid thing to say. There’s this little thing in prose literature that’s too long to be considered a short story but not long enough to be considered a novel, and it’s called the novella. It’s a bit nebulous to properly define in terms of word count and all that, but it’s an acknowledged form that encompasses quite a few generally highly regarded classics. I don’t see any reason why drama can’t encompass shorter forms too, despite Benedict’s preferences… I wonder what he thinks of Beckett’s later works, for example. Wonder, too, how many playwrights have struggled with the 90-minute format over the decades and had to avoid writing either too little or too much…
There’s something… not right about the idea of a 1928 talkie somehow in a way I can’t actually explain. I know the popularity of The Jazz Singer in 1927 kicked off the revolution and things developed throught out 1928 to the point where Hollywood had essentially given up on silent films by the following year… but somehow when I encounter a 1928 film with sound, I feel weirdly disconcerted by it. And I’ve seen a few of
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