Around this time of year it's traditional to publish predictions of various kinds. Although nowhere near as accurate as those of Paul the Predicting Octopus, most of them stretch beyond the limits of football match results, so I find them considerably more interesting.
Take, for example, these "20 predictions for the next 25 years" from yesterday's Observer. Lose yourself in the plethora of "experts" from twenty different industries, groups, or spheres of human endeavour. Erudite and influential though they no doubt are, commenters have already pointed out that few if any of them take account of the full impact of climate change over that period. At least one of them alludes briefly to the likely effect of oil shortages in terms of protectionism and conflict, but there's an even more precious liquid resource that we'll be fighting over sooner or later: water.
But my main issue with predictions like this is not that they go too far with their postulations, nor indeed that they don't go far enough. Extrapolating likely outcomes from current conditions takes a certain degree of understanding the subject in question, but beyond that there's no magic to it. The real question - and the most fascinating area of prediction - is not what will happen to the stuff we know about. It's what will be the next Facebook or Twitter? Or come to that, the next World Wide Web. Things which, before they were invented, no-one could have predicted. Things which, shortly after they were invented, no-one (or at least very few people) really understood how ubiquitous they would become. But things which, now they're established, large sections of the populace wouldn't know how to live without.
Another area I find fascinating might be called "Inventions whose time is past almost before it starts." When first developed, DAB radio (for instance) was widely predicted to replace traditional analogue broadcasting within a similar time frame to the 20 predictions above. Lack of available bandwidth, technical problems with mobile receivers (in-car DAB, etc), high price of early models and a general distrust of the product or a perception that it delivered limited benefit all contributed to appallingly low initial take-up. Now that many of the teething problems have been fixed, and the price has reached a sensible level, the need for DAB has evaporated. Replaced by Internet radio. Vastly more choice for anyone with a PC, equal or better quality, and with the increasing prevalence of home wireless networks, dedicated Internet radio devices are springing up to first supplement and soon no doubt supplant DAB in the home.
Showing posts with label radio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label radio. Show all posts
Monday, January 03, 2011
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
What was that about killing the radio star?
I better keep an eye out for that video, because last night at 6pm for a little over half an hour I, along with my partner-in-crime (well, songwriting) Annie, became a radio star.
We'd been invited in to Chorlton Arts Radio - an Internet-only, temporary radio station set up in an empty shop in the precinct to promote Chorlton Arts Festival - to do a bit of an interview and play a few tracks on Mike Bulfield's "The Festival" programme.
We had no idea before we arrived what form the slot would take, so we'd sat down together on Saturday and come up with a simple schedule of enough tracks and what we wanted to say about them to fill just over 30 minutes. We'd have been quite happy to fill the half-hour ourselves but as it turned out Mike had also prepared a few questions, and did an expert job of dovetailing his questions with what we wanted to say, giving us time to plug the website, and our forthcoming live gig at the Hotpot. During one of our off-air chats while our music was playing he congratulated us on being the most well-prepared interviewees he'd ever worked with.
Sorry if you missed it. No idea if they repeated the show at all (they were a bit short of content at one stage), but the entire radio station will be gone by the end of the week anyway. I'm told we'll have access to a recording of the show in due course, so I'm sure it'll end up being featured on one or more of our websites eventually :o)
We had no idea before we arrived what form the slot would take, so we'd sat down together on Saturday and come up with a simple schedule of enough tracks and what we wanted to say about them to fill just over 30 minutes. We'd have been quite happy to fill the half-hour ourselves but as it turned out Mike had also prepared a few questions, and did an expert job of dovetailing his questions with what we wanted to say, giving us time to plug the website, and our forthcoming live gig at the Hotpot. During one of our off-air chats while our music was playing he congratulated us on being the most well-prepared interviewees he'd ever worked with.
Sorry if you missed it. No idea if they repeated the show at all (they were a bit short of content at one stage), but the entire radio station will be gone by the end of the week anyway. I'm told we'll have access to a recording of the show in due course, so I'm sure it'll end up being featured on one or more of our websites eventually :o)
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
July Wednesdays. Number 2: The Alfred Bradley awards ceremony
As I mentioned last week, where Wednesdays are concerned July is a pretty hectic month. I did have one free, but not for long. Anyway here we are at number 2, and off I set to BBC Broadcasting House as one of the long-listed playwrights graciously invited to sit in the audience and watch those who beat us receive their prizes.
The ceremony itself was held in Studio 7. I'd never been in a studio before. Never been one of those who apply for tickets to watch shows being recorded, laugh on cue, or participate in... participation... events. As far as I could tell the main reasons for using a studio in this case were because they didn't have a meeting room large enough to accommodate the expected audience (of between 50 and 100 people) and because we were to be treated to a "script in hand" performance of selected scenes from the bursary winners' plays.
We were handed a programme as we arrived. For some reason, and completely out of character for me as someone pathologically early to events of all kinds, I'd interpreted the billed start time of 5.30 as the *earliest* I should turn up. In truth I couldn't have made it much earlier anyway, having not picked Nikki up from work until 5. Even so it was quite a shock to walk in at 5.33 and find the tiered seating already two-thirds full. A few even-later-comers drifted in after me, and we finally got underway a few minutes later.
A brief glance down the programme, which contained short synopses and bios of the finalists and their writers, revealed a truth which in my naivete I had not grasped until that very moment. The Alfred Bradley Bursary Award is open to first-time writers for radio. Writers who have not had a play produced for radio. Not, as I had assumed, writers who have never had anything produced at all. Here was my second shock of the evening. Reading passages such as
"X studied screenwriting as a post-graduate at the Northern Film & TV School..."
"Y holds... a MA in TV & Video. His first writing commission was from BBC Scotland and his sitcom won..."
"Z studied English at Oxford and his first play was produced earlier this year..."
brought home to me that this is very definitely a competition for serious professionals. Which meant two things.
1: I did well to be long-listed as an untrained, unlearned writer at my first attempt.
2: I never had any chance of winning.
Sorry if #2 sounds like sour grapes. It's not intended to be. I'm just trying to be realistic. Would any judging panel allow a complete novice to win over entrants with degrees in related arts and established track records of success in other media? Well, maybe. I guess if the writing was stellar they could claim "an amazing find." But the cynic in me says (loudly) that writing is turning out to be just one more of those cliques where success depends on ticking the right boxes and hanging out in the right crowds, and that part of the judging process would involve a close examination of previous achievements.
Six prizes were awarded in the end, out of the nine finalists. Two "Commended"s, who got a six-month mentorship with a BBC Radio producer to help develop their scripts; a Highly Commended (twelve months' mentorship); two Runners-Up (£1,000 bursary and a mentorship); and the Winner (£3,000 bursary, a mentorship, and a guaranteed production).
And here comes the third shock of the night. Because I well remember the clear directions we were given in the Christmas workshop, about how Radio 4's afternoon audience were sensitive little flowers to whom one wasn't even allowed to say "shit" let alone any of the edgier four-letter words we're all familiar with. And I remember the struggle I had trying to force dialogue to be dramatic, and violent, and powerful, without using those words.
And here's the winner. A monologue about, among other things, wanking.
"And we don't do wanking on Radio 4," says the commissioning editor (one of the judging panel), "so we're trying to get it commissioned by Radio 3, for The Wire. They do a lot of wanking over there. If that fails we'll do our damnedest to get it on Radio 4."
So the winner is someone who wrote what he bloody well wanted, bugger the rules and the guidelines, and the panel ignored their own rules as well and selected him the winner! I think there's a lesson there for all of us.
The runners-up and the winner each had a brief performance (looking like all those clips you've ever seen of radio drama in the making, with actors standing in front of microphones, their scripts in hand or on stand) and then it was time to head off to the bar, where the "drinks reception" proved to be a selection of wine or bottled beers (two varieties) and some bowls of nuts and crisps. As many of the attendees appeared to already know each other (long-term Alfred Bradley contestants, perhaps? Or all members of the same writing group?) I grabbed a beer and headed for the back of the room to people watch. Eventually I struck up a conversation with one of the Commendeds. One of the least qualified of the finalists, even he's had a play on at the Edinburgh Fringe, but he seemed a very nice chap. Also one for ignoring rules, I discovered, as he had brought his wife along when the invite had clearly stated "due to limited seating... there is no opportunity to bring a guest."
See, there's a pattern here. I'm just too rigid.
The ceremony itself was held in Studio 7. I'd never been in a studio before. Never been one of those who apply for tickets to watch shows being recorded, laugh on cue, or participate in... participation... events. As far as I could tell the main reasons for using a studio in this case were because they didn't have a meeting room large enough to accommodate the expected audience (of between 50 and 100 people) and because we were to be treated to a "script in hand" performance of selected scenes from the bursary winners' plays.
We were handed a programme as we arrived. For some reason, and completely out of character for me as someone pathologically early to events of all kinds, I'd interpreted the billed start time of 5.30 as the *earliest* I should turn up. In truth I couldn't have made it much earlier anyway, having not picked Nikki up from work until 5. Even so it was quite a shock to walk in at 5.33 and find the tiered seating already two-thirds full. A few even-later-comers drifted in after me, and we finally got underway a few minutes later.
A brief glance down the programme, which contained short synopses and bios of the finalists and their writers, revealed a truth which in my naivete I had not grasped until that very moment. The Alfred Bradley Bursary Award is open to first-time writers for radio. Writers who have not had a play produced for radio. Not, as I had assumed, writers who have never had anything produced at all. Here was my second shock of the evening. Reading passages such as
"X studied screenwriting as a post-graduate at the Northern Film & TV School..."
"Y holds... a MA in TV & Video. His first writing commission was from BBC Scotland and his sitcom won..."
"Z studied English at Oxford and his first play was produced earlier this year..."
brought home to me that this is very definitely a competition for serious professionals. Which meant two things.
1: I did well to be long-listed as an untrained, unlearned writer at my first attempt.
2: I never had any chance of winning.
Sorry if #2 sounds like sour grapes. It's not intended to be. I'm just trying to be realistic. Would any judging panel allow a complete novice to win over entrants with degrees in related arts and established track records of success in other media? Well, maybe. I guess if the writing was stellar they could claim "an amazing find." But the cynic in me says (loudly) that writing is turning out to be just one more of those cliques where success depends on ticking the right boxes and hanging out in the right crowds, and that part of the judging process would involve a close examination of previous achievements.
Six prizes were awarded in the end, out of the nine finalists. Two "Commended"s, who got a six-month mentorship with a BBC Radio producer to help develop their scripts; a Highly Commended (twelve months' mentorship); two Runners-Up (£1,000 bursary and a mentorship); and the Winner (£3,000 bursary, a mentorship, and a guaranteed production).
And here comes the third shock of the night. Because I well remember the clear directions we were given in the Christmas workshop, about how Radio 4's afternoon audience were sensitive little flowers to whom one wasn't even allowed to say "shit" let alone any of the edgier four-letter words we're all familiar with. And I remember the struggle I had trying to force dialogue to be dramatic, and violent, and powerful, without using those words.
And here's the winner. A monologue about, among other things, wanking.
"And we don't do wanking on Radio 4," says the commissioning editor (one of the judging panel), "so we're trying to get it commissioned by Radio 3, for The Wire. They do a lot of wanking over there. If that fails we'll do our damnedest to get it on Radio 4."
So the winner is someone who wrote what he bloody well wanted, bugger the rules and the guidelines, and the panel ignored their own rules as well and selected him the winner! I think there's a lesson there for all of us.
The runners-up and the winner each had a brief performance (looking like all those clips you've ever seen of radio drama in the making, with actors standing in front of microphones, their scripts in hand or on stand) and then it was time to head off to the bar, where the "drinks reception" proved to be a selection of wine or bottled beers (two varieties) and some bowls of nuts and crisps. As many of the attendees appeared to already know each other (long-term Alfred Bradley contestants, perhaps? Or all members of the same writing group?) I grabbed a beer and headed for the back of the room to people watch. Eventually I struck up a conversation with one of the Commendeds. One of the least qualified of the finalists, even he's had a play on at the Edinburgh Fringe, but he seemed a very nice chap. Also one for ignoring rules, I discovered, as he had brought his wife along when the invite had clearly stated "due to limited seating... there is no opportunity to bring a guest."
See, there's a pattern here. I'm just too rigid.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
English as she is spoked
As you might expect, with being a writer, I love the English language. Not just the wealth of vocabulary or the beauty of a well-crafted sentence, but its fluidity. It's ability to change and grow, adopting new words from other cultures and adapting existing ones to meet new needs.
Sometimes, the invention of new words, which can sometimes appear to be a full-time job for the tabloids, works really well. One of the best examples that springs to mind is "squarial" - a type of satellite dish introduced by British Satellite Broadcasting in the late eighties which was, you guessed it, both square and an aerial. As with most things these days, there's a Wikipedia page on it if you're interested, but the point of mentioning it is that it was a newly-coined word that, for me, worked really well because it correctly and succinctly described exactly what it was. Sadly the word, like the thing it described, became defunct in 1990 with the demise of BSB.
And also sadly, the phrase "works really well" can't be applied to all new words. Especially words like the one I heard on the radio today: nanobreak.
Intended to mean a short break (holiday) - one shorter than a weekend break, i.e. one night - it fails at the most basic level. The level of naive use of a term that has a specific, scientific meaning. "Nano" is an SI prefix meaning one billionth of something, as in: nanometre - one billionth of a metre. It also has widespread usage in relation to things on a nanometre scale, such as nanoengineering, nanotechnology, etc, but unfortunately it is also entering the popular consciousness as a "cool" way of saying "very small."
But, see, the problem I have with it, and the thing that made me roll my eyes in exasperation at the kind of marketroid thinking that does this to English, is that a nanobreak would be WAY shorter than a one-night stay somewhere. A nanobreak would be a billionth of a break. So assuming the measure "break" relates to what most people take as their annual holiday - two weeks (in which case, incidentally, a one-week break could be referred to as a semi- or demi-break) - then taking a nanobreak would involve going on holiday for 0.0012096 seconds.
Mind you, a lot of my holidays feel as though they've been that short, on the day I go back to work.
Sometimes, the invention of new words, which can sometimes appear to be a full-time job for the tabloids, works really well. One of the best examples that springs to mind is "squarial" - a type of satellite dish introduced by British Satellite Broadcasting in the late eighties which was, you guessed it, both square and an aerial. As with most things these days, there's a Wikipedia page on it if you're interested, but the point of mentioning it is that it was a newly-coined word that, for me, worked really well because it correctly and succinctly described exactly what it was. Sadly the word, like the thing it described, became defunct in 1990 with the demise of BSB.
And also sadly, the phrase "works really well" can't be applied to all new words. Especially words like the one I heard on the radio today: nanobreak.
Intended to mean a short break (holiday) - one shorter than a weekend break, i.e. one night - it fails at the most basic level. The level of naive use of a term that has a specific, scientific meaning. "Nano" is an SI prefix meaning one billionth of something, as in: nanometre - one billionth of a metre. It also has widespread usage in relation to things on a nanometre scale, such as nanoengineering, nanotechnology, etc, but unfortunately it is also entering the popular consciousness as a "cool" way of saying "very small."
But, see, the problem I have with it, and the thing that made me roll my eyes in exasperation at the kind of marketroid thinking that does this to English, is that a nanobreak would be WAY shorter than a one-night stay somewhere. A nanobreak would be a billionth of a break. So assuming the measure "break" relates to what most people take as their annual holiday - two weeks (in which case, incidentally, a one-week break could be referred to as a semi- or demi-break) - then taking a nanobreak would involve going on holiday for 0.0012096 seconds.
Mind you, a lot of my holidays feel as though they've been that short, on the day I go back to work.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Cut, cut and cut some more
After four passes through the play, the page count has reduced from 57 to 49 and the dialogue word count from well over 12,000 to a little over 9,000. The target according to the entry criteria is 7,000 but they *did* say at the workshop not to be too bothered about that.
I was aiming for the magic 44 pages (one page per minute) but it's getting tough now. Really tough. The fat is all gone. Extraneous scenes, flabby dialogue, all that went in the first pass. The second pass took care of anything I'd missed the first time round, and gave a hint at the hard decisions to come. Because the third pass really started cutting into the meat of the story and now it feels like I'm almost down to the bones. But still five pages and/or two thousand words too long. Or thereabouts.
I'll stick with it for another couple of passes through from start to finish, but I've got an increasingly loud little voice that's telling me not to go too far with this process. Going back to what they told us in the workshop, they expect a script to have to undergo quite a bit of "development" even after it wins, so maybe at this stage it's more important to worry about telling a good story - one that attracts the judges - rather than being overly concerned with whether it will fit in the time slot. That, after all, can be worked on later. First and foremost I have to convince the producer it's a tale worth telling.
I was aiming for the magic 44 pages (one page per minute) but it's getting tough now. Really tough. The fat is all gone. Extraneous scenes, flabby dialogue, all that went in the first pass. The second pass took care of anything I'd missed the first time round, and gave a hint at the hard decisions to come. Because the third pass really started cutting into the meat of the story and now it feels like I'm almost down to the bones. But still five pages and/or two thousand words too long. Or thereabouts.
I'll stick with it for another couple of passes through from start to finish, but I've got an increasingly loud little voice that's telling me not to go too far with this process. Going back to what they told us in the workshop, they expect a script to have to undergo quite a bit of "development" even after it wins, so maybe at this stage it's more important to worry about telling a good story - one that attracts the judges - rather than being overly concerned with whether it will fit in the time slot. That, after all, can be worked on later. First and foremost I have to convince the producer it's a tale worth telling.
Saturday, December 08, 2007
Sad nerdy geek speak
A few things we needed to sort out this morning prior to going off for the night to Nikki's works' do, chief among them going to the hair salon. Coming back from there, a band was being interviewed on the radio and as is my wont, I was only giving it half an ear.
The band are on tour at the moment, and the lead singer was telling the DJ that they only had 6 gigs left.
My immediate thought?
"Well that's plenty of space."
>sigh<
The band are on tour at the moment, and the lead singer was telling the DJ that they only had 6 gigs left.
My immediate thought?
"Well that's plenty of space."
>sigh<
Monday, July 16, 2007
Upon my Honor
I heard Honor Blackman being interviewed on the radio today. I'd tuned in for Steve Wright's big quiz, but he's on holiday again so Mark Radcliffe, who's standing in for him, wasn't following the normal format of the show (of course, since Steve has the copyright on his format).I couldn't believe how crass this guy was. I mean sure, most people remember Honor for two things - playing Cathy Gale in The Avengers, and playing Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. But that was pretty much all he wanted to talk about. She left The Avengers in 1964, the same year she filmed Goldfinger. These are both well over FORTY years ago! Didn't he think that at her age (she's either already 80 or she will be in December of this year, depending which source you believe) and with her experiences since, there'd be some other things - some more recent things - she'd rather talk about? I dunno, it just seemed to me that this well respected actress would by now have had enough of talking endlessly about roles she played so long ago. Maybe if that's all she'd ever done it would be excusable, but if you check her out on IMDb you'll see she's worked in just about every year since then. She's even had a part in Coronation Street!
To her (apparent) embarrassment the only other piece of her work this idiot was interested in was her hit single (it reached #5 in the UK charts) "Kinky Boots," recorded as a joke with Patrick Macnee - again in 1964 - since it was an allusion to Mrs Gale's penchant for leather clothing. Her Wikipedia entry records that it was a surprise hit in 1990 after being played incessantly on Radio 1, but even that's seventeen years ago! Doh!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
