Slow Air

What is all this?
What is this?
What is all extraordinary this?

Slow Air, BBC Radio 4, 18 September 2023

Ten years ago, maybe more, I was staying with a friends of mine in Bristol and I heard about the story concept of ‘slow glass;’; that is glass of a strange density that takes light years to pass through. The idea has been used in a number of stories, most famously by Bob Shaw in ‘Light of Other Days’. The idea seemed to me thrilling, full of endless story possibility. Unfortunately, my friend was a TV and film producer and was trying to get a film made using the idea so, good man that I am, I didn’t try to do anything with it.

Then, last year, BBC Radio remember - a little belatedly it seems to me! - that we are approaching the centenary of radio drama in this country, The first original radio drama broadcast on the BBC is usually said to be A Comedy of Danger by Richard Hughes, broadcast on 15 January 1924. They put a call out to get a season of plays that will mark this centenary - though not by explicitly talking about radio drama, but perhaps celebrate audio drama as a medium.

I thought of slow glass. I’ve never gone back to the original source and I figured it was in copyright and the idea was not original enough, but it got me thinking. And I wondered about a sound equivalent and soon I had the idea for a drama based on the idea of a cave on the Mediterranean island with a 32 year echo. What if a couple had whispered their thoughts to each other in the cave but now it‘s 32 years later and, in the meantime, one of the two is no more? Would you want to go back and find out what was said?

This is a gentle, domestic, family drama which I wanted to be feeling and sincere and serious - with this huge mad notion at the heart of it. It was a challenge to write; how far do you want to the magical realist notion to sit jarringly in the middle, complicating the realism? How far do you want that to be a given and focus on the characters? I’ve made my own choices; you might make different ones. The contemporary domestic story plays out among a forest of sounds and their echoes, voices from the past or for the future.

The play is, in part, a celebration of the power of sounds that we make and things that we hear and don’t hear.

Of course, the big challenge is that you set up a dilemma (will the partner go?) and you have to resolve it. Then you set up an expectation (what did the absent partner say?) and you have to meet it. These were fun challenges to meet.

We had a lovely cast, led by Forbes Masson as Paul and Ellie Turner as Penny, his daughter. Michelle Bonnard plays Yvonne and Sharan Phull is Susan. Max Runham plays Aureliu. Other parts are played by members of the cast (I have a cameo as an eccentric Italian geologist.) The piece is directed and produced by Polly Thomas and sound designed by Eloise Whitmore, for Naked Productions.