When I was a child there was a box of story book cassettes. It would come out for long car journeys, or whenever either my sister or I were ill and off school.
It is now sat on the desk beside me, along with a high stack of the StoryTeller magazines which I picked up at a car boot sale last week.
My sister had collected the magazines along with the tapes. I think hers are in an attic somewhere now. They existed in the house before me, and were a permanent feature of the world I was born into. They were also strangely inaccessible to my illiterate self. The images have etched themselves into my mind, but I don’t think I ever read a word until now. The tapes, on the other hand, talked to me. They conducted my brain like an orchestra, creating images of places, people and creatures from beyond the world I knew.
The Storyteller tapes were a brilliant mix of well read stories combined with a small amount of under-layed effects and music. It didn’t take much to bring a world to life; a simple wind track and a chime on the bells would perch you beside Gobbolino the cat as she watched the stars fly by from a witches broom.
There were of course other audio tapes too. Fantastic Mr Fox was a favourite. I can still see the hill with a tree on top, and its view of the farms, as if I had once been there - to this place that does not exist.
Later there was the BBC adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, from 1981. A co-worker of my mother had the entire series recorded from the original radio broadcast, and I spent days transferring the entire series over my parents’ hifi to create my own cassette versions, hand made covers and all. A couple of years later my friend bought the entire series on tape for himself. Too easy.
I think that production was my first real experience of radio drama. Scenes were not described to me, but played out by a host of actors surrounded by a world rich with sounds. I had already watched The Lord of the Rings long before Peter Jackson’s adaptations came out because I had listened to those tapes. I had seen the beating wings of flying beasts, seen Gandalf fall, seen the towers of Mordor.
Bill Nighy, Ian Holme and Peter Woodthorp recording at the BBC in 1981. From Brian Sibley's Blog
I couldn’t count how many times we listened to those tapes. How many nights we fell asleep listening to them, or days we spent drawing and animating in silence. Even now, when a deadline gets a bit heavy on the horizon those same episodes are carted out to ward off the worry.
After discovering this holy grail of the audio tape world, I set about searching for more. There were several other dramas produced by BBC Radio 4 which ignited the imagination, but nothing ever came close to the immersion that The Lord of the Rings had offered.
Radio Times cover for the first series of Journey into Space.
I discovered classic radio series like Journey into Space, and like many before me found a nostalgic joy in the densely exaggerated acting and creaky sound effects.
We spent a lot of time attempting to recreate that old school radio drama sound with Windows Sound Recorder and a cheap microphone from Argos. It was fun, but not enduring.
Today I find myself in the position I can only imagine many others find themselves. I think I’m in love audio drama, but I cannot find the dramas to prove it.
There is great work out there, yes. But there is terrible work too. The studio approach to recording audio drama has progressed a little, but not much, and is far from a guaranteed method of producing quality content. So why stick to it? Why don’t we treat audio drama like any other storytelling medium, and play with our techniques?
Auricle doesn’t have to be THE new way of doing things, it could just be A new way of doing things.