Podcast Nerds Rejoice: Radio Plays Are Making A Comeback

Before every home had a TV to point their furniture at, they had a radio: a big old wireless that would broadcast the stuff we still get from radio today (news and music), as well as the stuff we now get from TV, like quiz shows, comedy, drama, crime shows, and mysteries.

For the past few years, radio plays and multiple-episode radio serials have experienced a comeback. They might fall short of their heyday numbers-wise — this list of Australian radio series suggests we have a long way to go before getting back up there — but they’ve certainly become less daggy.

A lot of this comes down to the ways we listen, and the popularity of podcasts. In a recent New York Times article, Farhad Manjoo reminded readers that podcasting has always been bugged by claims of its dramatic boom or bust. It’s either the way of the future, or barely a thing. Instead, he urges us to think of the medium as “a slow, steady and unrelenting persistent digital tortoise”. It’s kind of the same for radio plays. I’m not going to call 2015 the ‘Golden Age of the Radio Play’ — they’ve been getting cooler for years now, and have always been around in some form or another. But this week marks the ABC’s first venture into a podcast-first serialised radio play, and that warrants looking at the tortoise for what it is.

How Do We Listen?

For radio plays, how we’re listening matters. Video might not have killed the radio star, but it did relegate radio to a past-time for the distracted; for people driving, washing up, or getting the kids ready for school. The idea that whatever was programmed in the evening would facilitate a communal family-listening experience was gutted.

But podcasts make the assumption of a captive audience possible again. Your listeners have sought out your show, and are more likely to listen from beginning to end. This changes things.

Play-only podcasts are rare, but they exist: The Truth, which markets itself as ‘movies for your ears’, has been carrying the radio-play banner since 2012, directed by widely-admired sound designer Jonathan Mitchell. Much of the buzz about the ‘Golden Age’ of podcasting rests on the shoulders of independent podcast collective Radiotopia, and it’s there that The Truth has found a home. More common are podcasts using radio plays as another tool in their storytelling arsenal. ‘A Funeral For Everyone I Know’, for instance, was a radio play published through The Organist podcast. Listeners don’t have to seek out a play; it comes to them through the podcast’s regular feed.

And this week, Radio National’s Radiotonic launch their first serialised radio play, A Thoroughly Wet Mess. It’s written and directed by sporadic Junkee contributor Aden Rolfe and stars the voices of actors known for their work on the small-screen, including Toby Truslove (Utopia, The Strange Calls), Tina Bursill (Neighbours, The Moodys) and Mark Lee (Gallipoli, Packed to the Rafters). The play is a serialised mystery, and follows the story of Sophie and Marc Marshall, descendants of the captain of the Mary Celeste, a ship whose crew went missing without a trace in 1872. They are aboard a replica of the Celeste that is full of the crew’s descendants, to recreate the ill-fated journey.

A Thoroughly Wet Mess — Episode One: The Ghost Ship

It’s hard to write about radio serials without referring to Serial, the podcast-first blockbuster series from the team behind This American Life. It’s too relevant here to leave out: A Thoroughly Wet Mess marks the first straight-to-podcast series from Radio National’s Creative Audio Unit. Premiering on Radiotonic’s usual spot on Friday June 26, it will then release an episode every week for eight weeks on a Wednesday, via the Radiotonic podcast feed. This is similar to the model used by This American Life to launch and distribute Serial — a model that saw them quickly top the iTunes podcast charts and break download records.

Part of Serial’s success rested on how the true-life narrative conformed to the conventions of dramatic story-telling. Rolfe and Radiotonic have stuck to those rules too: rather than crafting eight different stories, connected only by characters and a plot, they have crafted a drama, stoking subplots and building arcs in each episode. We grow attached to some characters, and suspicious of others. We spend the intervening week mulling over the mysteries that the previous week’s episode unravelled.

It has something else in common with Serial, too: a catchy, recurring theme score. The theme for a serialised radio drama serves the same purpose as a good TV score; it has its own language, which a viewer or listener knows how to understand.

Playing With Possibilities

So apart from going digital, how are the new wave of radio plays distinguishing themselves from the old?

Some are blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Audio Smut’s radio play Movies In Your Head used interviews about how perception was altered during early romantic relationships to script a play on the subject. Why Oh Why, Benjamin Walker’s Theory of Everything and WireTap blur that line even more, with nothing explicitly in the realm of the real or the fictional.

Radiotonic delved into this area recently too, airing Getting on with the Show, a one-off piece which mixes real interviews with a mockumentary set backstage at a fictional Australian musical.

Getting On With The Show

There are also opportunities for radio plays to fiddle with our ingrained knowledge of how radio is used to disseminate information. This is something taken to the extreme in the podcast Welcome to NightVale, performed in the style of community service updates for a strange, fictional town.

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There’s still something that scares me about downloading a radio play: it can feel like a gamble. I couldn’t put my finger on the fear, until I realised Nicholas Quah shared it. As a business journalist and a listener, he follows the podcasting industry closely. “I have a fairly strong personal bias against the very literal feeling of performativity that comes out of theatre folks, particularly but not exclusively in the cadence of their speech,” Quah wrote in his TinyLetter Hot Pod. “That’s infinitely amplified in a radio play — which is when it’s being mainlined into your ear.”

The fear that the voice-only aspect of radio-play acting will catapult me back into the audience at a drama eisteddfod is real. But just as when it’s a bit off it’s off, when it’s right it can be really right.

There are things that audio-only plays can do that ordinary plays and TV suck at, too. Sometimes disbelief is easier to suspend when the visuals are all in your mind. To take Game of Thrones as an example, I found this scene pretty powerful — until Daenerys got on a dragon, and all I could think of was playing with the green screen exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum.

At their best, radio plays have stories and characters just as strong as those on television, but give us back the element of imagination that draws us to read fiction. And the fact that we’re making them here in Australia is very exciting.

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Visit the homepage of A Thoroughly Wet Mess.

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Jess O’Callaghan is a co-Executive Producer of All The Best, and the producer of the Re-Readers podcast. Previously her writing and radio has appeared on the Meanjin podcast, Right Now, Something You Said, AWOL and Farrago.