Anatomy of a gamechanger : BBC Radio 4’s Life and Fate

Before the broadcast of a series of radio plays on BBC’s Radio 4 in September 2011, few people in the UK would have heard of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. The ubiquity of the Radio 4 adaptations in 2011 meant that not only did many more people know the book by name at least, but perhaps they were among the millions who downloaded the plays from iTunes. There were many elements to Life and Fate as a production that were unique, including its structure, the role of star casting within its production, its approach to adaptation, and its approach to genre-within-marketing. This paper explores the progression within BBC Radio 4’s drama department in the context of Life and Fate. As BBC radio drama evolves to respond to its audience(s), what kind of audience did it seek to reach with Life and Fate and how successful was it in doing so

Framing errors : reality and fiction in audio drama

Many genres and media create a blurring line between reality and fiction. Radio serials and in particular radio soap operas have inspired devotion in their listeners to the point where their fans throw themselves wholeheartedly into a universe of outward unreality and inward reality. This leads to framing errors, by which I mean an extension of blurring of reality. We will look at several examples from world radio soaps, including those from the US, Britain, Turkey, France, and Poland. However, radio soap operas do not have a monopoly on the blurring line between reality and fiction. Instead, audio drama is poised to profit well from this uncertainty and has shown itself capable of it many times, beginning in the 1920s in Europe and most famously in War of the Worlds (1938). War of the Worlds is, however, not the end of the story, and the way audio drama uses framing errors continues to this day. The stud