• BBC Northern Ireland Drama department makes drama and readings for Radio 4, Radio 3 and BBC 7.

• At present BBC Northern Ireland Drama does not have slots or commission drama or readings for BBC Radio Ulster.

• For all the networks we will begin planning what to offer several months before each Commissioning Round opens. Once we have selected those ideas we would like to put forward we will discuss with the relevant Commissioning Editor and decide on which to offer formally to the network. In all cases the final decision about whether or not to commission an idea rests with the Commissioning Editor and the Network Controller.

• BBC Northern Ireland Drama will only consider unsolicited material if sent via the writer’s agent. If you do not have an agent please log on to www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom for information about how you can submit work for consideration.

• We produce the bulk of our drama and readings for BBC Radio 4: Woman’s Hour Drama series; Afternoon Play; Friday Play; Saturday Play; Classic Serial; Book At Bedtime; Afternoon Reading. There are two Radio 4 Commissioning Rounds per year, usually in April and October. We will approach writers several months beforehand for material for Woman’s Hour Drama series; Afternoon Play; Friday Play and Saturday Play. The best way to get an idea of what Radio 4 look for is to tune in. You will find Radio 4 on 92-96 FM and 198 LW and you can also listen to programmes on Radio 4 by logging on to the Radio 4 website at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4

• For Radio 3 we produce drama for Drama on 3 and The Wire. There is one Commissioning Round per year for Radio 3, usually in May. Again we will approach writers several months beforehand, discuss ideas with the Commissioning Editor and then offer formally to the Network. Radio 3 can be found on 90-93FM.

• BBC 7 is principally an archive network, which carries comedy, readings and drama. It is also to be the home of children’s radio. The network also has a brief to commission a small amount of new programmes in certain genres. The main slots we offer to are Edited/Abridged readings and Original drama covering Sci-Fi/Horror/Fantasy/Crime & Thrillers. Ideas for original drama are compiled in advance of discussions with the Commissioning Editor and formal offer. BBC 7 usually commissions alongside Radio 4. Listen to BBC 7 on DAB Digital Radio, Freeview, Digital Satellite, Digital Cable and the internet.






RADIO 4 GUIDELINES SPRING 2009

Programme type: SATURDAY PLAY
Day: Saturday
Time: 1430-1530
Tape duration including opening and closing announcements: 57’ or 87’

EDITORIAL GUIDE

What are you doing on a Saturday afternoon? I am sure you – like the rest of our
audience – are busy.

Your Saturday Play Offers need something in them to make them a compelling must
listen pitch.

Joan of Arc played by Dawn French, a play celebrating Alan Bennett’s 75th birthday,
Walter Now starring Sir Ian McKellen, a play by Nigel Planer, the complete Ripley
novels, the real story behind The Sound of Music, etc, are the kind of programme
that we hope the audience will make a date with, they are plays that the audience
would want to buy a ticket for if it was in the theatre.

As a slight shift in commissioning we are also interested in commissioning 3 or 4
titles per year that are right for “family listening.”

These will largely be dramatisations, mostly at 60’, and the titles we are looking for
are the books that parents want their children to read rather than the books children
(7-16) are reading. We are keen on non heritage fiction – Peter Pan in Scarlet rather
than Peter Pan.

We have commissioned Journey into Space 2, Emil and the Detectives, The Wizard
of Oz (and all at 60’).

They need to be headline titles.

1) 60’ Saturday Plays

The Saturday Play is about compelling narrative driven stories. Plot is crucial.

They should not be extended Afternoon Plays.

We are not looking for old fashioned old school radio drama – we want the Radio 4
equivalents of Slum Dog Millionaire, Revolutionary Road, The Reader, Valkyrie,
Mamma Mia, The Sixth Sense, The Bourne Ultimatum, Casino Royale, When Harry
Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, etc.- i.e. must listen popular high class
entertainment.

Although we are primarily interested in Singles, if you were to come up with
something as compelling and ambitious as The Lord of the Rings we would run with
it.

The Saturday Play is the home of genre fiction. We are looking for:

· crime and detective stories
· ghost stories
· great trials
· family listening
· love stories
· mysteries
· thrillers, etc etc.

BUT THEY HAVE TO STAND OUT
Beware the rustle of crinolines! We will commission plays set in the past, but not
many, and in the last Offers round nearly everything we were offered was set in the
past.

This is not a slot for new writing

As these rub shoulders with the stage plays in the schedule it is really important that
they make as much noise as them – your new play is likely to be sitting alongside
Ayckbourn’s Man of the Moment, Duet for One, an Alan Bennett or a play by
Stephen Poliakoff, and they need to be as much a treat for the audience as those.

2) 90’ Plays

We do very few, so that they need to be stand out titles, and are almost all stage
plays or screenplays.

We are very happy to have Offers, but we tend to commission these in an ad hoc
fashion outside of the Round (eg we have just commissioned Duet for One as a
transfer from the West End).

Programme type: WOMAN’S HOUR 15’ SERIES
Day: Monday-Friday
Time: 1045-1100
Tape duration including opening and closing announcements: 14’
Repeat: 1945 weekdays

EDITORIAL GUIDE

This strand gets more airtime and gets the largest audience than any other drama on
Radio 4 outside of The Archers. It offers writers more minutes per week to tell their
story and explore their characters than any other commissioned drama strand. This
needs to guide our thinking about what gets offered and commissioned here.

Will the story bear being stripped across the week?

Does it have the weight to bear 10 transmissions per week? The tone of the book
will help define the tone of the Network the week it is broadcast – you need to think
about the impact of your programme.

(i) A quarter of the titles, eg We Need to Talk About Kevin, Jane & Prudence and
The Concise Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers, will be commissioned as
enhanced abridgements, ie semi dramatised, multi voiced, and with a strong
soundtrack. We call these bespoke abridgements.

(ii) We want to encourage our best writers to attempt 75’ signature pieces.

(iii)We want to create series with strong returning characters.

(iv) We have broadened the remit of the slot away from specifically women’s
literature.

While programmes in the slot will often reflect the values of Woman’s Hour, we do
not need to be slavish about this. Importantly we also need to make the slot work for
the post Front Row audience.

Broadly what we are looking for to fill the slot over the 6 months covered by this
round is 10 or more weeks of original writing, up to 10 weeks of dramatisations of
contemporary fiction, and 6 weeks or so of dramatisations of classics.

Unless the idea is exceptional it is unlikely we will be commissioning series of 15’
unlinked singles in this slot.

Take note

This is the hardest one to get right!

(i) Budget is an issue; the bespoke abridgements will attract a lower budget than
full dramatisations and we will commission a range of titles with a range of
budgets. Please make the price on the offer as accurate as you can. The
figure may affect whether or not the offer is commissioned.

(ii) Simplicity is the key. Simplicity and lower cost often go hand in hand.

(iii) The slot requires a strong idea, a simple sharp format led by characters
whose story we want to follow over several episodes. Getting the audience to
fall in love with a character is as important as getting them gripped by the
story. Too many characters will confuse the audience – and blow your
budget.

(iv) With dramatisation, we need to know how you are going turn a novel (or nonfiction) into 15-minute episodes. We will need a copy of the book with the
Offer. If you do not submit one the Offer will be rejected.

(v) One week is the norm, except for dramatisations. However, we will rarely do a
little known novel that needs a fortnight. 3 or 4 weeks is epic, 5 weeks is
uncharted territory….

What we are looking for
· Series that will return. We have Ladies of Letters, we migrated Daunt and
Dervish from the Afternoon Play to Woman’s Hour, and we have Writing the
Century. Almost everything like this will play out as single weeks, but we want to
keep returning to them relatively frequently. We want to build up audience loyalty
to characters and formats.
· Dramatisations of classic novels and contemporary fiction will remain a major
element of the strand. The Color Purple, Q&A and A Child in Time were three
stand out recent titles. Because narration works so well in this slot we want to
find novels – both contemporary and classic - that will work as semi dramatised
abridgements, multi voiced (but not full cast) and underpinned by a soundtrack
(we have just done Heartburn, programmes like, I Love My Rifle More Than You
and To the North were made this way. It won’t work for some books – as a rule of
thumb the prose needs to be very well written, the dialogue needs to be crisp and
it helps if the narrative voice is either part of the story or has a very strong
attitude towards the story. Voltaire’s Candide or Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones
would work well, whereas Agatha Christie probably won’t. We are looking to
abridge the novel rather than dramatise it, reduce the number of voices and to
retain the novel’s written integrity. These will have a lower budget than full
dramatisations, but we expect to give the audience a good listen. Please flag up
prominently on the Offer if this will be your approach.
· This slot, along with Book at Bedtime, will be the place to play out longform
contemporary fiction on Radio 4. We are looking for new titles that we think will
break through or have broken through, the bigger more well known the better,
and the very best in recent contemporary fiction (ie think of modern titles we are
unlikely to play out in the Classic Serial slot): but remember they will need to
break down into 15’ episodes. While it is obvious that some writing is very male
skewed (we suggest you do not offer Len Deighton here) the reading public for -
say - Nick Hornby, Tony Parsons, William Boyd, Ian McEwan et al - is as much
female as male. We want to commission them for this slot.
· I Love My Rifle More than You and Baghdad Burning were very successful for us:
they were contemporary and they were about the ordinary lives of people caught
up in the biggest news story of the decade. At least one title per Round will be
like this.
· Because of Writing the Century we will not be commissioning much else in the
way of journals and correspondence or the people’s history of the 20th Century.
· Detective and crime stories, mysteries or thrillers are welcome – but we have a
lot in the mix at the moment.

Programme type: AFTERNOON PLAY
Day: Monday-Friday
Time: 1415-1500
Tape duration including opening and closing announcements: 44’

EDITORIAL GUIDE

What this slot is for

Story Story Story

Take the audience on a journey.

The Afternoon Play is about storytelling. You can do virtually anything in the
Afternoon Play – as long as you are telling the listener a good story.

What we broadcast here

The glory of the slot is its enormous range. Anything and everything goes here:
contemporary and period drama; comedy; biography; issue-driven plays; dramadocumentary; family plays; crime and thrillers; poetry; romance; fantasy; etc. It can be a play; or a dramatisation (of short stories, letters, memoirs or non-fiction – but avoid material we could dramatise elsewhere, eg the Classic Serial) or a dramatised feature; or a narrative poem; or a sequence of interlinked short plays. Or a play half in French.

But: do you have a good story to tell the Radio 4 audience?

Obviously, we have to work within the constraints of entertaining a large audience
(roughly 750000 per afternoon), but there is no drama slot within broadcasting with
as much editorial latitude as Afternoon Play. Find new ways to tell stories and we
will play it out here. Be imaginative!

Grab the audience at the beginning and keep them guessing and intrigued until the
end. Easy.

Series

All series, serials and pilots will be commissioned in the commissioning round.

The volume of Series vs Singles is now about at the right level – roughly 40 of the
190 slots will be series, etc – and of course we are looking for returners (Brief Lives,
No 10, McLevy etc) so the volume of new series will be low.

However we are looking for striking new ideas using series, - ie plays with a selfcontained storyline with characters who follow through from episode to episode.
More specifically, we want low-format, contemporary, domestically-set series. No
detectives, no hospitals or medicine, no period, please.
We are keen to have either
(i) a returning domestic series that really cuts through (this is the Holy Grail
for me)
and/or
(ii) the Radio 4 equivalent of The Street.
 
We want heroes. Character is as important as situation/setting. Pilgrim and McLevy
are heroes, and wonderfully flawed ones.

Rather than commission a whole run for a new series we are tending to commission
a single stand alone play – and if it works as a single and we think it has the legs for
a series we will commission more episodes, eg the Lenny Henry Bad Faith started
out as single and is now a series.

No more than six parts, please. If you want to develop a series, please discuss it at
the earliest opportunity with me. The writer or writers are crucial.

We are also looking for portmanteau collections of plays. Find an umbrella or a
format or a theme (eg, Arabian Afternoons is a contemporary riff on The Arabian
Nights) and group three or four plays. The Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare
Retold were both very clever ways for BBC ONE to reinvent the single play; the key
to their success was retelling familiar but great stories in a completely fresh way.

We are looking to commission one serialisation stripped across the week: there is
very limited scope here. The title has to be iconic, eg the Gospel according to St
Luke.

We will also commission the occasional two-part play or dramatisation, but these will
need to be outstanding (eg Rumpole or two linked plays about Enron, etc.)

Singles

Obviously, if we are broadcasting more series and serials in the afternoon, we shall
be doing fewer singles. However, singles will be the bedrock of the Afternoon Play.

The first question you will need to ask yourself - does this stand out as a single?
Our singles need to have a hook to pull in the audience. Your idea needs to
whet the audience’s appetite, to draw them in and to make it a must-listen. This is
not about star casting, but about how gripping, different, exciting the story and the
premise are. What will make our audience listen?

Of course it needs to be a good play – but the Offers that get through invariably have
something else to offer our audience.

Simplicity is crucial.

We are keen to encourage writers to write for particular voices, for particular actors,
eg we are working on an idea written for David Bower (Hugh Grant’s brother in Four
Weddings and a Funeral).

What we are centrally looking for are stories about life as experienced by our
audience now or which give a window onto their lives. We will favour contemporary
stories over period.

However, we are still very keen on history and biography, but:
(i) Simply dramatising someone’s life is a non-starter. The rule of thumb is: will
the play work if you substitute the name of the famous person for a name like
Smith? If the answer is No, then it probably isn’t a good play and the answer
is No, we won’t want it. Your subject also needs to be someone the audience
care about. Last year we broadcast a play about the cast of Beyond the
Fringe, a bunch of people every listener to Radio 4 will have an interest in –
while we have not commissioned plays about Byron, John Clare, Scott
Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway etc. who in our view are people we think the
audience should care about.
(ii) Please don’t make the history obscure. We are much more interested in
dramatising the big events (eg the collapse of Enron) and the key players
than the byways and the nonentities, although it is often interesting in story
terms to look at great events from the point of view of bystanders. You need
to be aware of Writing the Century still running in the Woman’s Hour drama
slot for the next year.
(iii) Is it relevant? Does the history have a real resonance with now. Plays that
look at history to discover the present are always welcome. Think how plays
like Brian Friel’s Translations, Brenton’s Romans in Britain or Brecht’s Galileo
all look at the state of the times through the prism of history. I think that the
way to develop these is not to think of some spurious link between the event
you want to dramatise and contemporary life, but to decide on the burning
contemporary issue you want to dramatise and then find the historical parallel.
No plays about previous credit crunches, etc please – if we are going to cover
the recession (or is it a Depression?) we would far rather commission plays
about how people are coping with it now than how they coped with it
whenever.

Dramatisations

We will do a very few single dramatisations in this slot – but they will need to be
markedly different from the dramatisations we play out in Woman’s Hour and the
Classic Serial – Listen to My Year Off by Robert McCrum – it is exactly the kind of
dramatisation we want in the slot. The End of the Alphabet was breathlessly
beautiful and simple.

It is very unlikely that we will commission short story dramatisations from writers we
commission into the Classic Serial.

Tone

Think about the audience. There is only so much gloom they can take. This is not a
social-work slot. Of course, we want plays about contemporary social and domestic
issues (eg we have Dignity about assisted suicide coming up) but they need to be
handled imaginatively and, often, with a light touch.

Shameless takes people at the very bottom of the heap and makes them fun and life
affirming. It is very entertaining.

Plays should be about something. This is not a green light to fill the slot with plays
about issues. But even the most imaginative flight of fancy needs to connect with life
as the audience lives it.

We are always looking for good comedy drama.

Explorations of the world of the imagination play well in the afternoon. We have just
commissioned a play about a precocious rabbit who gets excluded from school.
Cavity, which just went out, is about a couple conducting a sexual relationship
through a wall.

There is always room for poetry, but making it work to fill a 45’ narrative is tough.

Drama-documentaries do well in this slot and we are being offered very few.
I think it is easier and more creative to think of these more in terms of documentary
features in a drama slot, ie drama informed by journalism, by feature making
approaches and techniques, etc etc than hardcore drama doc which is quite a limited
form.

But please think how the drama and the actuality are going to work together. Would
the story be better treated as a documentary feature? You will need to have a track
record in documentary production to get these off the ground.

Talent

Every year we will commission over 40 plays in the afternoon by first or second time
writers new to writing for radio. This means over 20 Afternoon Plays will be by new
talent in this round.

New, different and diverse voices are the lifeblood of Afternoon Play. New,
engaging, exciting ways of telling stories is what the slot is about. New writing and
writers are central to this – but please make sure new talent is both writing for our
audience and not recycling the kind of play that they think will work for the Radio 4
audience, which too often feels like a script written 10 years ago.

A writer’s second commission is as important to us as the first.

Programme type: CLASSIC SERIAL
Day: Sunday
Time: 1502-1600
Tape duration including opening and closing announcements: 57’

EDITORIAL GUIDE

What this slot is for

Although the label is on the tin, so to speak, this strand is not exclusively about
classics. It is about high-quality serialisations of literature in the widest possible
sense that are a good Sunday afternoon listen – classics, modern and ancient
literature, poetry, non fiction etc.

Good clear storytelling is at the heart of the strand. The title of the book is key. This
doesn’t mean we will do only well-known titles. But, without a strong title to sell, the
offer really needs to whet our appetite.

However, this is not the commissioning round to dust down long forgotten tomes
from your library. In 2010/11 we will launch Neglected Classics as part of the slot;
the commissions will come through the Drama Department. We will launch this
spring: major writers will pitch their favourite Neglected Classic on Open Book whose
audience will vote on the one they most want to hear. We will dramatise the most
popular title (and maybe others from the shortlist of 10) as part of the classic serial
schedule in 2010/11.

If it works it may become a kind of franchise.

For this reason we will be commissioning very few (if any) titles of undiscovered,
neglected and forgotten classics, and the titles we are most likely to commission will
be well known.

By spring of 2010 Smiley will have run its course, so the embargo on post 1918
fiction no longer applies. However, the bedrock of the slot will still be the big 19th
Century titles, etc.

What we broadcast here

Across the year, Classic Serial should contain a mix which is enjoyable, popular,
occasionally surprising and/or stretching – but, above all, which raises the audience
awareness of this slot as a real treat, something to stay in for. A lot of Classic
literature has a tendency towards gloom – we are keen to commission titles that are
very entertaining. Feel good fiction will have a strong place in the schedule.

Please consider how the offer will work in both slots – Saturday evening and Sunday
afternoon.

Our definition of “classic” has latitude – and remember that storytelling is the thing
that drives the slot.

We will not consider a book that we have broadcast as either a dramatisation or a
reading in the last 10 years, unless there are exceptional circumstances. Please
refer to the Full List of Published Titles document if you are in doubt.

Similarly if it has been done on TV or has been made into a movie in the last 10
years we will probably not consider it.

Here is how our thinking of the slot breaks down.

The Classic Classic

The bedrock of the strand – nearly half of the titles – will be the big classic titles
(mostly 19th-century or early 20th-century and mostly, but by no means exclusively,
English-language).

They are treats for the audience and will have a familiar title and/or author. If it isn’t
a classic, it needs to be a brilliant piece of storytelling with a well-known title.
We will be obvious, not obscure or clever. High-quality nostalgia works very well on
a Sunday afternoon, as does the occasional children’s classic – but think of modern
children’s writing rather than nostalgia (eg Jamila Gavin’s Coram Boy was the 2008
Christmas Classic Serial).

Don’t be afraid to be robust with the book in your treatment. Last year novels like
The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Good Soldier Svejk were done boldly and
brilliantly – just dramatising the novel would have made for very dull listening.

The Neglected Classic

Please see above. There will have to be a compelling reason to do titles in this
category.

The Unexpected Classic

“Classic” doesn’t mean “classic novel”.

About two titles per year should come from left field - poetry, history, biography, the
documentary book - whatever: surprise us, surprise the listener, push the envelope
of the slot.

However, it must be a good story and you must have a firm handle on how it should
be produced.

Eg coming up in the schedule we have Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Chaucer’s
Troilus and Criseyde.

It is our intention to commission at least one non fiction title and one poetry title.
Surprise us!

20th Century Classics

As mentioned above the Smiley enforced embargo is off – but we will do very little
post war fiction.

We are keen to commission one twentieth century children’s title to run at Christmas.
Think post 1945 rather than pre.

Narration

It is emphatically not a badge of courage or boldness to dramatise a novel without
narration. Narration is a very effective way of guiding the audience into a story and
of course gives the audience a flavour of the prose of the book, but this is not a hard
and fast rule – sometimes narration can be deadening and is lazy dramatisation.
Listen to Helen Edmundson’s version of The Major of Casterbridge – it used
narration brilliantly and sparingly in a way that was integral to both the story and the
drama. It wasn’t just copying out screeds of the book.

Approach
Meddle with Jane Austen, for example, and you may get crucified – the wayward film
of Mansfield Park sank very fast. But, if you are not robust with some books, your
programme will fail. Dombey and Son which was played out in the Woman’s Hour
Drama slot just before Christmas was brilliant and hardly used a word of Dickens.

If you don’t have a bold approach to the “unread” classic such as Burton’s The
Anatomy of Melancholy - the audience will wonder why we bothered – Radio 4 is not
a museum for literature.

Will the title in question fit better into the Woman’s Hour slot than in Classic Serial?

Take note

No singles please.

Programme type: FRIDAY PLAY
Day: Friday
Time: 2102-2200
Tape duration (including opening and closing announcements): 57’

EDITORIAL GUIDE

This is year zero for The Friday Play

What has gone before in the Friday Play has often been brilliant, provocative,
challenging and award winning, but with a much reduced slate it is time to rethink
this slot.

We intend to commission all titles in this round.

One of the outstanding dramas of 2008 played out in this slot – One Chord
Wonders. Another play - What I Heard About Iraq – missed winning the Prix Italia by
a squeak.

We are up against everything that TV has to throw at its schedules and our audience
are probably unwinding at the end of the working week and we want to offer them
something irresistible to listen to.

Think first about what you would like to hear on a Friday evening, what will make our
audience want to listen. Think about how you can get the Any Questions and Point of View audience staying tuned to the Network rather than switching to Have I Got
News for You.

Although Radio 4 has no actual watershed this is the one regular drama origination
that is “post watershed” – we can challenge, provoke but we need to entertain as
well.

Anything goes here – but with only 12 titles we want each one to make an impact.
We don’t do enough comedy, we want genre fiction, we want big ideas, we want
challenging drama and brilliant stories. We want the audience to notice.

The Friday Play will continue to broadcast the best original authored work. Please
bear in mind –
· The feel should be largely contemporary.
· Very rarely will we commission new writers into the slot
· 60’ needs a lot of narrative to sustain it.
· We will consider single dramatisations (NOT SERIALS), but your approach
will need to be bold and challenging

We are intrigued to see what you will Offer!

RADIO 3 SLOTS

DRAMA ON 3
Day: Sunday
Time: 2000 (depending on duration)
Duration 80’-180’ although the most common duration is 90’

EDITORIAL GUIDE

Drama on 3 is a showcase for new and classic long-form dramas. They aim to commission an ambitious range including distinctive new productions of classic and modern stage plays, international drama in translation, adaptations from fiction and radio versions of current stage productions alongside substantial commissions for new writing.

Landmarks: To give listeners more memorable experiences, raise the profile of radio drama and reach wider audiences they are looking for dramas, events and seasons that will have greater impact. These may extend across different stations or platforms, including online, and they are working closely with Radio 4 (and BBC 7), in particular, to identify such opportunities. A recent example is the joint celebration on Radio 3 and Radio 4 of The Royal Court anniversary.

Although Drama on 3 is primarily focused on long-form drama they will also consider proposals for shorter dramas, such as a series of very short dramas broadcast through a week, where this will offer audiences a distinctive dramatic experience. Offers would need to show an understanding of the Radio 3 schedule and audience and make the case for breaking the mould in this way. They would also expect outstanding creative talent to be involved. They will not consider 15 minute serials as these are well represented on Radio 4.

Special events and seasons are a distinctive part of the Radio 3 schedule and offers to Drama on 3 may include suggestions for a larger network event e.g. a themed evening which might be produced in partnership with another supplier and include complementary speech and music programming or an interactive dimension.

Sound and Innovation: They are looking for plays that take listeners into a wide range of experiences and sound worlds from the highly-crafted and poetic to more raw and documentary. They are interested in proposals that develop and deliver drama in different ways. Recent examples include ‘The Lysistrata Project’, in which the classic story was reinterpreted through workshops with teenagers and ‘Hold My Breath’, devised through improvisation.

Diversity: They are looking for diversity in talent and subject matter and aim to reflect in our drama the diversity of the UK.

Range: Classic drama, including Shakespeare, is an important part of the mix. Although they will take account of recent broadcasts, and rarely commission a new production of a play broadcast in the last 7 years, their interest in any classic will be largely determined by the distinctiveness of the proposal. They want to know what inspires the play being produced for the audience at this time as well as the nature of the interpretation.

They are interested in innovative pairs or groups of plays which may mix classics with contemporary stage plays or new writing around a particular theme.

International drama: They are looking for proposals for stage plays or adaptations which will reinforce Radio 3’s engagement with international culture e.g. currently commissioned is a contemporary drama from China ‘Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana’.

New Writing: New commissions are usually to writers of some experience and reputation. They welcome proposals that engage with the contemporary world as well as historical subjects. If the play involves the portrayal of real people this must be made clear in the proposal.

Adaptations: In recent commissioning rounds they have received a disproportionately high number of proposals for adaptations. Successful proposals have offered a clear sense of how the original will translate to a single play and a purpose for doing so.

20th Century Stage plays: Radio 3 remains interested in proposals for 20th century stage plays as part of the range.

Partnerships: Radio 3 has already developed partnerships with a number of companies such as the RSC but welcomes other ideas for collaborations with acclaimed companies or major directors.

THE WIRE
Day: Thursday
Time: 2200
Duration: 30’ - 60’

The Wire is for writers who have broken the mould, courted controversy, entertained; writers who want to explore the medium of radio in an original and innovative way.

The Wire is part of Radio 3’s commitment to the boldest new writing, for distinctive award winning writers from contemporary theatre, film, radio and literature. (Also interested in collaborations and partnerships with visual artists.)

Want to attract writers to the station who are new to radio, writers with a track record in other media or genuine raw new talent.

Headlines
• Bold, original writing.
• New ways to tell potent stories.
• Distinct voices from across the country.
• Writers and producers that take an innovative approach to the medium.
• This is a writer driven slot so we want to encourage the writer as auteur/producer
• Collaborations between writers and composers and with award-winning artists from other mediums are welcomed.
• Ambitious ideas that take a risk, surprise us by the direction they want to take. The edit is an important part of the process.
• This a drama slot so we are not looking for sound collages: the story matters.

BBC 7 SLOTS

Original Drama: SciFi/Horror/Fantasy
Mon-Fri 1800-1900 repeated 0000-0300

Original Drama: Crime & Thrillers
Mon-Fri 1000-1100 repeated 2100-2200

These genres are very popular with the BBC 7 audience and are promoted as their 7th Dimension and Crime & Thrillers zones. BBC 7 welcomes proposals in both genres as there is a comparative shortage of them in the BBC Archive.

They expect to commission original drama, divided between the genres, either as short series or single drama and are interested in developing ideas along the following lines;

• Original writing (not dramatisations of existing works)
• Small cast
• Innovative production techniques
• Low Cost
• Can include a comedy element

It is probably wise to avoid Sci-Fi themes set in the 1950-1970 period since these are fairly well represented in the archive.