Caligari - Sue Roberts

Sue Roberts produced the recent radio adaptation of the classic silent film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, which was written by Amanda Dalton and broadcast on Sunday 26th October on Radio 3. You can listen to Caligari now on the BBC iPlayer.

Was Caligari a hard sell to the Radio 3 Commissioner?

It was fairly straightforward. Amanda Dalton has a strong track record with both the Radio 4 and Radio 3 commissioners. I think this makes more experimental work easier to place.

There are so many themes in Caligari - the process of writing itself, war and its effect on the individual, power, reality, and the mind - that it offered a framework for the discussion of big ideas which sat very easily in the Drama on 3 slot.

What gets you excited about a writer?

Quite simply, good writing and different ideas. I can't tell you how wonderful it is to get a piece of writing that crystallises the truth about a given situation, or makes you see something familiar in a completely different way. I'm always looking for the truth. I want real people really talking to each other in a real but unpredictable way. I want to be moved. If you can make me cry, so much the better.

I love clever use of language and am drawn to more poetic work. Radio is a natural home for poetry. It is a writer's medium. The poetic eye often gets you into places you might not have otherwise imagined. Caligari is a perfect example of that. The language and style match and reflect the strangeness of the surreal world and the original black and white images in the most perfect way.

In terms of ideas, I want to be suprised more than anything. A writer has to be as clever about the idea and the twists and turns of the narrative as they have to be sharp in the dialogue, and I think it is easy to forget this. The commissioners see hundreds of ideas. They want to be suprised. They don't want to see the same obvious idea over and over again as the obvious never gets commissioned - and I don't want to make it either .

What would you say to writers starting out who are interested in radio?

• Listen to radio. Be aware of what's broadcast, the different slots, the kinds of new writing, and where they appear.
• Think about the possibilities of radio - it's a radical, versatile and entirely contemporary medium. Be imaginative and bold.
• Think about how radio is heard - you can do almost anything, and go almost anywhere, but you're not going on this journey alone - you have to take the listener with you, otherwise what's the point?