The Stage

Radio 4 searches out dramatic impact

Published Tuesday 2 August 2005 at 13:20 by Liz Thomas

Mark Damazer, controller of Radio 4, is to shake up the station’s drama with more “high spot” event programming, featuring name playwrights, in a bid to draw listeners and highlight the range of programming it broadcasts in the genre.

He said that while the channel’s average drama audience of 6 million a week is much larger than most people realised, he wanted to use high-profile productions to bring audiences in and attract them to other shows they may not have been aware of. The station’s output has come under fire in the past for a lack of consistent quality and Damazer is keen to show there is more to the genre besides The Archers.

As part of the overhaul, he has promised to bring a greater volume of adaptations of work by some of the best playwrights of the last 40 years to the station, including Harold Pinter, Alan Bennett and Tom Stoppard. Speaking to the Broadcasting Press Guild, Damazer said: “We will try to do 12 of these plays over the next year. They will probably run for 90 minutes on Saturday afternoon.”

Damazer, whose current annual programming budget is £76.1 million, added he was hoping to get such writers to produce new plays. He also admitted that introducing new writing was difficult because of the risks involved but said he still felt that Radio 4 was the place for upcoming talent.

There are also plans for the station to supplement its current affairs and news programming with topical fiction. He explained: “If you get a fictional version [of news and current affairs events or issues] it tends to be years down the line. I’d like to see more prose or strong drama within a matter of days of things happening.

“We need to find other ways of getting topicality into the schedule, whether it is pieces about the [Michael] Jackson trial or the Royal wedding. During the Asian tsunami, I’m not saying we should have done a drama set on a Thai or Sri Lankan beach but we might have tried something set in a charity office about what they were trying to do.”

He also revealed that The Friday Play had lined up Hollywood actress Sigourney Weaver, star of the Alien series of films, to feature in a new drama later this year about a Vietnam war nurse. Damazer also announced that pianist Daniel Barenboim will give 2006’s series of the annual Reith Lectures, which will be broadcast in April and May.