How do you make cutting edge radio drama in an ecosystem designed to screen out anything edgy? Over twenty-five years of making silly audio stuff, I’ve learnt three things.
Firstly, being able to write a script, direct actors, and bring it to life with sound design is incredibly rewarding, even if no one is listening. Secondly, it is extremely labour intensive to make, whether you are working in BBC studios in Cardiff or in a studio you’ve fashioned from mattresses against the wall in your bedroom. Thirdly, the market for such stuff is almost totally controlled by what the BBC want, and so any hope you might have of making interesting things are almost immediately thwarted by a necessity to thread that needle.
When I first teamed up with Chatterbox Audio to see if A Very British Sabotage could get made, we approached the usual suspects. The Chatterbox CEO, Gareth, was not overtly political — he just loved the sound of the story and my pitch. Surely Audible and the BBC would show an interest. I knew better. After firing off a few queries, the very next day Gareth informed me that in his entire career as an audio producer and preferred vendor for both the BBC and Audible, he had never had a pitch turned down so swiftly.
The irony is that when I approached both a director and a sound designer at the very pinnacle of the radio drama industry directly — who between them have over 40 years of top drawer audio drama production under their belts — they leapt on AVBS immediately.
Chatterbox Audio had discovered what most media producers on the left have learned over the years. No matter how relevant or entertaining, our stories aren’t being told. Our people not represented. Gatekeepers be gatekeepers.
A former BBC TV exec I approached whilst Paul Holden’s The Fraud was doing the rounds on Newsnight and Peter Mandelson was being arrested on national news, declined to help me, citing other Labour Party figures as more problematic. They had zero interest in turning AVBS into a television drama because “I have never forgiven him for allowing Brexit to happen.” ‘Him’ was, of course, Corbyn.
Fortunately, the steady establishment of a left-wing new media ecosystem that’s grown in the UK since 2015 has rectified that gap. Now that ecosystem, having suffered various economic shocks since its birth, is reaching a new point in its maturation. The Canary, for example, has just launched a national daily paper — a far cry from Morgan McSweeney and Labour Together’s noxious campaign to defund the news platform back in 2017. The indies are growing up.
The plan with A Very British Sabotage was always to ignore mainstream audio broadcasters like the BBC and make the thing ourselves. Prior to an investor appearing, my plan was to somehow crowdfund the budget and then offer donors free access to the finished drama, before flogging it directly to the online left via social media.
The concept of taking our product straight to the public has been done before in the audio drama world, as anyone who continually thirsts for Doctor Who audio stories can attest. Big Finish Productions knock those out at a whopping £24.99 for eight 30-minute episodes.
So our plan is simple. We’re going to make the roughly seven 30-minute episode audio drama and sell it directly via social media for £4 a download. And if we get enough downloads to break even, our commissioner has said they will immediately reinvest that to make the second season, covering 2017–19.
That’s the plan.
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