Radio 4 plans week-long drama of stand-alone episodes

Published Thursday 29 July 2010 at 13:45 by Matthew Hemley

Red Production Company, which made the dramas Queer as Folk and The Mark of Cain, is creating a six-part series for BBC Radio 4, which will be broadcast across a week.

Cottonopolis will comprise five 15-minute parts to be transmitted daily in the Woman’s Hour slot, and one 45-minute episode that will be broadcast in an Afternoon Play slot.

The series, which focuses on the disappearance of a number of women in Manchester and the ensuing hysteria that grips the city, is being created so each episode can be heard as a standalone drama or listened to as a complete series.

Radio 4 drama commissioner Jeremy Howe described Cottonopolis as “an excitingly ambitious idea”. He told The Stage: “Because the story of Cottonopolis is as much the story of how a city copes with an ugly series of crime, as it is the story of how those directly affected by the crimes cope, we felt that it would benefit from being given more airtime. The trick for us is to make the Woman’s Hour drama complete in itself - with our audience being able to catch any episode and understand what it is about and be hooked by it, without having heard the previous episodes - and the Afternoon Play work as a standalone play.”

The series, to be broadcast next year, is being created by Nick Leather, who said he was using the idea of missing women to look at the way “truth can become a casualty” of the media’s desire to hold people’s interest in the news, and “the knock-on effect of this in terms of people’s lives”.

Cottonopolis, which is being written by Leather and Michelle Lipton, is being produced by Justine Potter. Casting has yet to be confirmed.