4:2 DRAMA BRIEFS

Programme type: SATURDAY PLAY

Day: Saturday

Time: 1430-1530

Tape duration including opening and closing announcements: 57’ or 87’

Estimated number of programmes available for open competition:

6 x 57’; 4 x 87’

Transmission period: April 2011- March 2012

EDITORIAL GUIDE

NB (i) we will aim to commission all the titles in the WOCC for 2011/12 in this spring commissioning round

(ii) Although the Friday Play slot has been decommissioned we are still keen on carrying some of the harder tougher edged dramas that played into the slot (think RIP Boy by Neil McKay about a murder in Feltham Young Offenders Institute, I am Emma Humphreys about the overturning of a prostitute’s conviction for murdering her pimp, etc): we will do two maybe three a year at 60’, placed in an evening slot but they should be offered through the Saturday Play; you should clearly mark the Offer as a Friday Play.

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One word should guide you in your thinking about Offers for this slot – Showbiz.

What are you doing on a Saturday afternoon? I am sure you – like the rest of our audience – are busy, which means your Offers need something in them to make them a compelling must listen pitch.

We launched The Complete Smiley in the Saturday Play slot, this is where we played out Ripley and will play out Chandler, we have James Bond in Goldfinger, new plays by David Hare and Christopher Hampton based on unmade screenplays, an unperformed play about Kipling by Paul Theroux, Lenny Henry’s Othello, plays about Vincent Price’s The Witchfinder General, the theft of Munch’s The Scream and the designing of the Spitfire, stage plays by Ariel Dorfman, Ronald Harwood and Stephen Poliakoff, etc etc: they are the kind of programmes that we hope the audience will make a date with, they are plays that the audience would want to buy a ticket for if it was in the theatre.

We are still looking for “family friendly” titles: these will largely be dramatisations, mostly at 60’, and the titles we are looking for are the books that parents want their children to read rather than the books children (7-16) are reading, and should be tailored to the grown up audience rather than 10 year olds. We are keen on non heritage fiction – Peter Pan in Scarlet rather than Peter Pan.

We have commissioned, The Indian in the Cupboard, Leon Garfield’s Devil in the Fog and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. These should be 60 minutes not 90.

They do need to be headline titles: if the title isn’t in the public domain chances are that we won’t be interested.

1)60’ Saturday Plays

The Saturday Play is aboutcompelling, narrative driven stories. Plot is crucial.

They should not be extended Afternoon Plays.

We are not looking for old fashioned old school radio drama – we want the Radio 4 equivalents of Edge of Darkness, Inglorious Basterds (although we are quite picky about spellin’), the Sherlock Holmes movie, Men who Stare at Goats, The Reader, Mamma Mia, Casino Royale, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, etc.- i.e. must listen popular high class entertainment.

Although we are primarily interested in Singles, if you were to come up with something as compelling and ambitious as The Lord of the Rings we would run with it.

Because we have commissioned all Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels we will be looking for very little more crime and detection in the slot for the time being.

The Saturday Play is the home of genre fiction. We are looking for:

  • ghost stories
  • great trials
  • family listening
  • love stories
  • mysteries
  • thrillers, etc etc -

BUT THEY HAVE TO STAND OUT

Beware the rustle of crinolines! We will commission plays set in the past, but not many, and an overwhelming number of offers we have been receiving are rooted in the past.

This is not a slot for new writing.

As these rub shoulders with the stage plays in the schedule it is really important that they make as much noise as them – your new play is likely to be sitting alongside Willy Russell’s Educating Rita or Noel Coward’s Private Lives, and they need to be as much a treat for the audience as those.

2) 90’ Plays

We do very few 90s, so they need to be stand out titles, and are almost all stage plays or unproduced screenplays.

Titles that have been really successful for us have been A Pack of Lies, The Killing of Sister George, The Real Thing, The Lady and the Van, Trevor Griffiths’ These Are the Times, etc., whereas the Royal Court at 50 season, for all its merits, did not go down all that well with the audience.

3) Friday Plays – if we receive Offers that we think can only be played in an evening slot we will commission them out of the Saturday Play commissioning pot. If we don’t get any really strong Offers we won’t commission any, and it is likely to be no more than 2 or 3 over a year – but we do not want to lose the capacity to run tough uncompromising stories by the best writers in radio. Please make it very clear in the first line of the Offer that this is for broadcast at 2100. They will be commissioned out of the Saturday Play commissioning budget.

Recent Commissions

Kane and the Case of the Unhinged Agent / An edge-of-the-seat, hard-boiled radio film-noir about how Citizen Kane and its maker were nearly destroyed in the run-up to the Oscars ceremony in 1941.
"My Dear Children of the Whole World" (aka Upon This Rock) / Vatican City, December 1942. As war rages across the globe, Pope Pius XII prepares to deliver his annual Christmas message. It is perhaps the most important public address he will ever give - and that's why the Pontiff faces the starkest dilemma of his reign.
And Then There Were None / Agatha Christie. Ten guests travel to an island at the invitation of someone named U. N. Owen, and one by one are killed….
Payback / The story of ten days in 1973 at the beginning of the Yom Kippur war, when the US government reversed its policy and airlifted 22m tons of arms to the threatened state of Israel, changing the balance of power in the region forever. Three world figures - Golda Meir, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger - do the deals, as their personal relationships, and Nixon's Watergate nightmare, combine to change the course of history.
THE ROAD HOME / Mike Walker. An original SF adventure by one of our best writers.
The White Man's Burden / World premiere of Paul Theroux's first play about Rudyard Kipling's humiliating final months as an American resident.
The Vanishing / A dramatisation of Tim Krabbe’s cult thriller. Rex Hoffman is so haunted by his girlfriend's disappearance that he allows her murderer to repeat his perfect crime on him.
An Inspector Calls / Classic Stage Play about middle class hypocrisy and deceit
Classic Chandler: a Philip Marlowe Series / This series brings all the Philip Marlowe novels, six major onesand two less well known, to Radio 4's Saturday Play.
Gone to Ground / A wartime adventure thriller featuring the exploits of an English guerrilla unit trained to make things as difficult as possible for the German invasion force.
Marley Was Dead / A bold, innovative, festive comedy about what happens when the people who know what they're doing leave the idiots to run the office. Peoplykus will attempt to destroy both Radio 4 and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit / Judith Kerr's semi-autobiographical book vividly evokes the story of the rise of the Nazis and the experience of being a refugee.
Translations / Brian Friel's masterpiece about language and power.
THE INDIAN IN THE CUPBOARD / A dramatisation of Lynne Reid Banks' wonderful story aboutOmri and his magic bathroom cupboard
Murder in Samarkand / British Ambassador in Uzbekistan loses his job because hemakes a public issue of government torture.And leaves his wife for a pole dancer. A true story, adapted from a David Hare screenplay.
WHITE CHAMELEON / Autobiographical screenplay about Christopher Hampton's childhood in Alexandria, brought to an abrupt end by the Suez invasion.
James Bond’s Goldfinger / 007 with a further licence to thrill
The Jubilee Singers / A play with songsabout the Jubilee Singers, a 19th-century black American gospel group who toured the world introducing the Spirituals or Sorrow Songs to a new audience: in England, they were loved by everyone from miners and dockers to Queen Victoria, and made the spiritual Swing Low Sweet Chariot known throughout the world.
An English Tragedy / May 1945: victory in Europe, and a Labour landslide. English traitor John Amery is arrested in Italy and brought back to London for trial. If convicted, he faces the death penalty. But his father is a senior politician; surely the Establishment will look after its own. Adapted from Ronald Harwood’s stage play.

PROPOSAL TO INCLUDE

(Also see notes on how to prepare Drama and Scripted Comedy offers in SECTION 1:6.)

The full offer (excluding the RAP front pages and any supporting script material) should not be longer than two A4 sheets.

Please include details of the experience of the writer/writers and previous plays commissioned from them.

Casting information is not required at this stage unless this is a vehicle for named performers.

If it is a dramatisation you must include a copy of the book, if it is a published play a copy of the play. If you do not the offer will be rejected.

Programme type: WOMAN’S HOUR 15’ SERIES

Day: Monday-Friday

Time: 1045-1100

Tape duration including opening and closing announcements: 14’

Repeat: 1945 weekdays

Estimated number of programmes available for open competition: 50

Transmission period: April 2011 – March 2012

EDITORIAL GUIDE

NB (i) We will aim to buy the entire WOCC quota of WHD for 2011/12 in the spring commissioning round

(ii) It is back to business as normal with the slot – we have no plans to omnibus any more weeks of the programme once A History of the World in a Hundred Objects has played out.

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This strand gets more airtime and gets the largest audience of any drama slot on Radio 4 outside of The Archers. It offers writers more minutes per week to tell their story and explore their characters than any other commissioned drama strand. This needs to guide our thinking about what gets offered and commissioned here.

Will the story bear being stripped across the week?

Does it have the weight to bear 10 transmissions per week? The tone of the programme will help define the tone of the Network the week it is broadcast – you need to think about the impact it will make.

Simplicity is the key.

The slot requires a strong idea, a simple sharp format led by characters whose story we want to follow over several episodes. Getting the audience to fall in love with a character is as important as getting them gripped by the story. Too many characters will confuse the audience – and blow your budget.

One week is the norm, except for dramatisations. However, we will rarely do a little known novel that needs a fortnight. 3 or 4 weeks is epic (but we like epic), 5 weeks is uncharted territory….

(i) We want to more series with strong returning characters.

(ii) We want to encourage our best writers to attempt 75’ signature pieces. An hour and a quarter split into 5 fifteen minute chunks is the length of a short feature film. Unlike most feature films it will play to a sizeable audience.

(iii) We want to broaden the editorial thinking around dramatisations in the slot. Consider all types of book – essays, travel journals, cookery books, science, art history, self help, stage plays, biography, history, social history, memoir, etc.

Of course you need to find a clever way of dramatising them, a boldness of approach that is challenging and exciting, but I think one of the best dramatisations we have done recently has been Robert Forrest’s turning a book of lists into a murder mystery. The Pillow Book is now on series 3…

Surprise us, surprise the audience.

Who knows: there is probably a good Instruction Manual out there just begging to be dramatised.

Because Writing the Century will have finished in its present format the bar is lifted on diaries and journals, but please don’t clone Writing the Century.

We don’t want books off the Book of the Week reject pile.

(iv) A quarter of the titles, eg The Shooting Party by Isobel Colegate and Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell, etc.,will be commissioned as enhanced abridgements, ie semi dramatised, multi voiced, and with a strong soundtrack.

(v) We have moved the remit of the slot away from specifically women’s literature.

While programmes in the slot will often reflect the values of Woman’s Hour, we do not need to be slavish about this. Importantly, we also need to make the slot work for the post Front Row audience.

Broadly 40% of the commissions will be original writing, 40% dramatisations of contemporary fiction, and 20% dramatisations of classics. We are not being offered many classics – and every once in while they are a real audience treat.

Unless the idea is exceptional it is unlikely we will be commissioning series of 15’ unlinked singles in this slot.

  • Returners.

We currently have about half a dozen. We want more.

Although we have commissioned the last series of our longest running returner – Ladies of Letters – we do have a list of returning titles and potential returners, eg –

Twilight Baby.com – Jenny Éclair embraces motherhood as a 50 year old

Singleparentpals.com – will Maxine Peake finally meet Kris Marshall for real rather than in the single parent chatroom

The Art of Deception– a further adventure in the life of art forger Douglas Ballantyne

The Pursuits of Darleen Fyles– how hard is life on your own when you are twenty and have severe learning difficulties

A Small Town Murder– PC Jackie Hart is involved in another murder case as a police community liaison officer

Pillow Book– crime and detection and lists in Mediaeval Japan,.

We would like returners to play out as single weeks but are keen to keep them running every 6 to 9 months to build up audience loyalty to our characters – if you produce a returner it may well be worth your while offering us two series at once.

Darleen Fyles was originally a Friday Play, Chronicles of Ait which will run early in 2011 was originally an Afternoon Play – the single is a good way to find if a character/setting has legs for a series.

Characters are what returners are all about. Get the audience to fall in love with them and you are halfway there.

It is worth noting that many of the writers of our returning series have considerable experience in writing series TV.

  • Dramatisations of classic novels and contemporary fiction will remain a major element of the strand. The Color Purple and Q&A both won Sonys. Restless by William Boyd was a stand out production in 2009. This slot, along with Book at Bedtime, will be the place to play out long form contemporary fiction on Radio 4. We are looking for new titles that we think will break through or have broken through, the bigger more well know the title, the better, and the very best in recent contemporary fiction (ie think of modern titles we are unlikely to play out in the Classic Serial slot): but remember they will need to break down into 15’ episodes. While it is obvious that some writing is very male skewed (we suggest you do not offer Len Deighton here) the reading public for - say - Nick Hornby, Tony Parsons, William Boyd, Ian McEwan et al - is as much female as male. We want to commission them for this slot.
  • Enhanced abridgements, which we now call Semi Narrated Dramatisations (don’t ask me why) Semi Dramatised Narrations: because narration works so well in this slot we want to find novels – both contemporary and classic - that will work as semi dramatised abridgements, multi voiced (but not full cast) and underpinned by a soundtrack (listen to Villette which went out in the summer) It won’t work for some books – as a rule of thumb the prose needs to be very well written, the dialogue needs to be crisp and it helps if the narrative voice is either part of the story or has a very strong attitude towards the story. Voltaire’s Candide or Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones would work well, whereas Agatha Christie probably won’t. We are looking to abridge the novel rather than dramatise it, reduce the number of voices and to retain the novel’s written integrity. These will have a lower budget than full dramatisations, but we expect to give the audience a good listen. Please flag up prominently on the Offer if this will be your approach.
  • We want non fiction titles. I Love My Rifle More than You and Baghdad Burning were very successful for us: they were contemporary and they were about the ordinary lives of people caught up in the biggest news story of the decade. At least two titles per year will be like this.
  • Writing the Century in its current format will come to an end in 2011 and the bar on diaries has been lifted, but we are most definitely not looking for clones or retreads of WTC. We should broaden our thinking of what works in the slot - we will not be commissioning much else in the way of journals and correspondence or the people’s history of the 20th Century.
  • Detective and crime stories, mysteries or thrillers are most welcome.

PROGRAMMES COMMISSIONED IN THE LAST ROUND