Radio in Review: The Truth

“The Truth… movies for your ears” goes the tagline of this radio project, which has managed the impressive feat of creating radio dramas that don’t bore the shit out of me.

Please... no! Not an omnibus!

I have long abhorred radio dramas, with the main focus of my hatred being Radio 4’s ‘The Archers’ and the quarter hour crime against my ears which is the Woman’s Hour’s ‘15 minute drama’. Both of which are basically 15 minutes of middleclass white people sighing and moaning over a kitchen sink. This aversion could be down to my dislike of soaps as a format, but I believe I am frustrated with the way these two programmes completely fail to utilise the creative potential of the radio medium. Both dramas reduce the radio drama to a cheap man’s TV series, whilst trying to compensate for the lack of visuals by destroying any sense of subtlety.

David Tennant... a radio star!

Of course, radio dramas do not have to be painful. The BBC’s World Service has produced a number of wonderful plays. Also, Radio 4’s ‘Love Virtually’, which was voiced by David Tennant and Emilia Fox in March 2012, was a brilliant drama revolving around the romantic correspondence between two individuals who never meet.

This work played to radio’s strengths as a non-visual medium, since the drama unfolds purely through a series of emails and letters. The radio drama was captivating since the characters had no knowledge of what each other looked-like, a facet which was an essential ingredient to the story. It rose beyond poor-man’s TV and created something that was meant to be appreciated as a unique audio experience. ‘Love Virtually’ can be downloaded at this link (incidentally, I have absolutely no connection to the site that is hosting the mp3):  http://www.david-tennant.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/lovevirtually.mp3

But I digress, so let us head to ‘The Truth’ of the matter. In the same way that ‘Love Virtually’ utilised the purely auditory aspect of radio to present an epistolary novel effectively, ‘The Truth’ finds inventive ways of presenting stories for a listening audience.

For example, in ‘Tape Delay’, an episode that was my introduction to the series, the drama revolved almost entirely around phone conversations, placing the listener in the same shoes as the protagonist. It starts off with a phone conversation between a male protagonist and his would-be-date. However it soon goes beyond this original phone conversation, as the protagonist listens back to the original phone conversation (which he accidentally recorded). Then in an act which could only ever work on radio, he decides to load the recording onto his computer and edits it to produce his own fictional radio mini-dramas using his would-be-date’s voice. This piece fully utilises the way audio is open to manipulation in a way that video is not. Do give it a listen: 

Again, in ‘Eat Cake’ they are able to use telephone conversations in order to produce a sweet romantic comedy, which like ‘Love Virtually’, embraces the fact that the appearance of the characters is mystery. This probably my favourite episode.

‘People Beat’ indicates that ‘The Truth’ (and possibly radio drama as a whole) excels best at short stories, which cover small individual situations. This piece works by having a humorous setup as the female protagonist stresses in anticipation of a potentially embarrassing family catastrophe.