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The Alfred Bradley Bursary Award is for writers based in the North of England who are new to Radio. The bursary marks the legacy of producer Alfred Bradley, whose programmes included the Northern Drift, which was broadcast from the Â鶹ԼÅÄ's studios in Leeds from 1964 and featured the work of many northern writers who went on to great success.

You can read more about Alfred Bradley's life and work in this blog post by his son, Jez Bradley

To launch the 2021 bursary, we ran an online event with guests including the former bursary-winner Cat Jones and Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio Drama North Producer Gary Brown. The event was packed with useful advice for anyone interested in writing Audio Drama. You can read edited highlights below and watch interviews with three other recent winners and runners-up with their top tips.

Cat, can you tell us a bit about your writing career and how much writing you had done before applying to the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award? 

CAT:

Not very much actually. At the time of applying I was working at Doncaster prison, running arts initiatives for prisoners there, so the writing I had done was mainly little bits and pieces that I had written for prisoners to perform or to workshop, looking at particular kind of issues. The play I entered with was something that I had written having worked with a group of prisoners who had all been in the military before they had arrived at the prison and who all felt that their military experience had contributed to them coming to prison. The play seemed to connect really well with a wider group of prisoners at the prison, and so I decided to enter it. 

What impact did winning the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award have on your writing career? 

CAT:

I didn't really have a writing career at the point of entering. I mean, I think with any prize really, or winning any kind of recognition, there is the validation, the thought that somebody might think you are good enough to do this. There are a lot of prizes that you can enter that do that and then even better than that, is a prize that gives you validation but also gives you some money and obviously, this did that. I think the gold standard of awards or prizes is something that also then gives you some real-world professional experience and with this bursary, you get a commission, you get the opportunity to make a piece of radio. So, it had a huge impact. 

Tell us about your role as a producer Gary, what you do and how you work with writers. 

GARY: 

I am an enabler really. As you know, radio is a writer's medium, we are constantly on the lookout for new writers and that is why the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award is so important to us. I'm here to enable the voice of the writer to get to the listener, and it should be a very enjoyable process. Usually it starts from an idea to an offer, then it goes to the commissioner and then if the commissioner likes it and commissions it, it takes about a year to be developed, and will go through probably four, five, six drafts if it is a new writer. Hopefully we develop a good relationship together, a trusting relationship and my job is to get the best out of the writer and then we have the fun part of casting it, going to the studio and having lots of fun in the studio.

What should a writer think about when writing a radio play? 

CAT:

I think all the things you would think about in terms of writing for any medium, a really good story and compelling characters and taking an audience to a world that they will want to spend time in. All those usual things. But beyond that, the unique opportunity of radio is the relationship with sound. I like to think of it as silence is the canvas and every word that's uttered and every sound that's made and every note of music is a mark being made upon that canvas and the offering that you make to the audience. It's just an incredibly intimate medium, radio. If theatre is all about the collective experience, radio is almost the opposite. It's usually a person on their own, relating to this play, which is a really cool thing. 

Radio is a really immersive medium as well. With theatre, you have, however intimate the space is, you have always got some kind of barrier between an audience and a stage and with screen you have always got the barrier of the screen itself. But with radio, you can actually put the audience absolutely right in the middle of the action. You can have this incredibly intimate thing going on between two characters and you can literally put the audience on the table between them. That is such a powerful thing. I think that's just the beauty of radio really, that kind of intimacy and that immersive experience. 

Also I think it's collaborative, you know. I don't think there is another medium where the audience is sort of a co‑creator in a way. You are making a movie, but you the writer or producer are bringing the aural aspect of that movie and the creator is going to bring the visual. That collaboration is unique. You don't get those things with other mediums. 

GARY: 

Cat has said it all! You just summed it up absolutely perfectly. It's the most collaborative medium, it is the most immersive medium. It is a film for the mind in many respects. You are in the most intimate space. That's why listening to radio is often so good with headphones on. 

I think the biggest mistake that writers new to the medium make is that they think it's closest to theatre and it isn't. If it's close to anything, it's closer to film and also the novel, because you are conjuring up the images with a novel. For me, it's a hybrid between film and the novel. 

In the same way as a novel, if you want to, you can get inside the mind of your characters with voice overs and internal monologues. It isn't mandatory, but it is an option for you. I have worked in most of the mediums, but radio to me is the most exciting, and I am a writer as well, so as a writer, it's extraordinary, because you are building from nothing, it's a visionless medium, but yet you are creating images. It’s a very, very powerful medium for a writer to have. The writer is the absolute key to it all. 

Because this is a one to one relationship, how quickly does the writer need to get into that main part, the main action of the story. When does the inciting incident need to happen in a radio play? 

GARY: 

As quickly as possible. A mistake that writers can make is that there's too much of a set‑up. Often you look at a script and you go, “I don't need these beginning scenes, just get into it as quickly as possible”. It is when you start looking at your own script, your first draft, you will overwrite, but then when you go over it and start doing more drafts, you think, what do I need, how much essential action do I need, and often you strip away stuff and it's usually the set‑ups. 

You should get that inciting incident in there quite quickly. I mean, for the Alfred Bradley Award, I would say make sure the first ten pages are the best that you can write, because basically, that will be what will grab the reader. Don't worry about setting up stuff, don't worry about exposition, because the exposition will come through the characters, just hit the ground running. Get some action going, get the inciting incident going. You will find that you will grab them straight away. All the information that they need to know about the characters and story will develop as you go along. Exposition should be just seeded as you go along. But hit the ground running I would say. 

Cat, do you have writer tips for grabbing people's attention in the first few minutes of a radio play? 

CAT: 

I think writers generally, we want to give too much information. We want exposition, we feel like audiences need to be orientated and I don't think they do. Audiences like to be thrown in and if they have to run a bit to catch up and work stuff out themselves, that's fine. I think it's absolutely just about being bold and being brave, being brave with the opening. 

GARY: 

Pose questions straightaway, right from the word go, you are creating dramatic problems and you want the collaboration of the listener, the audience to think what's going on here, you don't want them to be passive, you want to engage them from the word go, so they are hooked. It's just really important to hook them straightaway.

How do you deal with the fact that if people aren't hooked straightaway, they will change the channel? 

GARY: 

There used to be a phrase we used to use, which is “lean forward radio”, which is when you are driving your car, when you are doing the gardening and listening to it on headphones, you stop and you lean forward and you listen and you think right, this has grabbed me, I'm stopping from doing the usual things that I'm listening to radio with, because this drama has grabbed me. Occasionally, I get missives from the public and they will say things like "I stayed in the car park to listen to the end of your play for another ten minutes, because it had grabbed me and I needed to know what happened". When you do get e‑mails from listeners like that, you go, yeah, we grabbed them. That's it. You are telling a story. It's a very privileged position to be in. You are grabbing the hand of the audience and taking them on a journey and so you've got to make sure it's a flipping good journey and interesting and surprising and not run‑of‑the‑mill. You are taking them to surprising places. A very privileged position to be in, to be able to have a platform where you tell a story. 

What are your tips for using sound in radio, how should it be used, how should it not be used? 

GARY: 

Because of the nature of radio, the great thing about it is that you are not limited by expense, so you can go anywhere. So you could be on the moon. Recently I did a play set on a spaceship. That would be a very expensive set. It had a very, very specific sound because we tried to get a huge station with a very metallic sound, very spacious. We are lucky that we've got some fantastic sound engineers, sound designers in audio drama north, who can create amazing spaces. 

I would say to writers, be bold. Don't set things in a room - you can if you want to, but you can be bold, and you can set it anywhere. You can be in Barbados, you can be in the earth, a colleague of mine did a drama, which was made into a podcast and it was set in the future, and the earth was flooded (Listen to 'No Place But the Water'). The soundscape is extraordinary, because of the water and the idea of the earth dying. So be bold, think of unusual places to set your drama. 

However I think the most important thing is still story and character, that's what the audience is really, really interested in. Really, that's our job, to fill in and texture up all the rest of the stuff. Sometimes writers get carried away, for instance with music and they will tell us what music they want to include. That's fine, but then there will be the lyrics and the lyrics from a commercial song, interspersed and then that's not your voice. What we are interested in is your vision and your voice. So what I would say is, set it in an interesting place but then concentrate on the story, concentrate on the characters. I think the interesting things come with the collaboration with the sound designer and the producer and see what comes out in the studio and in post‑production.

Are there any other things to avoid when writing a radio play? Are there any things that you come across a lot and you think that's somebody who maybe doesn't listen to radio, or that's just a misconception about radio? 

GARY: 

First of all, listen to radio, it's really, really important. A lot of people start writing for radio and they don't listen to radio. So listen to it, there are plenty of radio plays on. You will find that if you haven't listened to radio for a long time, radio has changed. It's much quicker. One of the first things I do when I look at a script, I have a sneaky look at how many scenes there are in a play. If there are only a few, I start to think, well, maybe they haven't been listening to radio, because the thing about radio is that it's quickened up, it's much pacier. So you can have a lot more scenes. It can move on. You can tell a story with a lot of scenes, like a film. So I would encourage people to do that. 

The other thing is not to have too many characters in a scene, because the audience can't grab on to too many characters. If you have those characters in a scene, establish them very early on in the scene, because if you have characters in the scene and all of a sudden somebody comes up who you haven't established, the audience will go, "What, where did they come from, have they been hiding in a corner?" It's really, really important to establish your characters. If you have four characters, establish them straight away in that scene. 

The usual rule of thumb, getting into a scene as late as possible and coming out of it as quickly as possible. And don't have people coming in through doors, don't start a scene with people coming through a door, it's really boring. You can cut that out straightaway. Get them in the room, just cut into the room. Don't worry about it. One of the best things that you can have as a writer is cut to. When you finished the scene, cut to. That's it. The meat of the scene, move on. 

Cat, what was the main thing you learned about when writing for radio? 

CAT: 

I think trying to keep in mind how the idea that you want to explore connects to the medium of radio. You could tell this story probably in a different way, you could probably put it on the screen, but why is it going to work particularly well on the radio, why is that intimate collaborative space the right idea for this idea, if you can start from that place of finding that connection between the idea and the medium, that's a really, really sound place to start. 

What is a Radio 4 afternoon drama like, what are the dos and don'ts, are there any topics to avoid, any things to avoid, what should people be working towards or thinking about when trying to fill that slot? Or write for that slot? 

GARY: 

Just think of a very bold and exciting idea because that's what I'm looking for as a producer, it's what I'm looking for as a listener. I want to go to places where I've never been. Just look at situations and come at them from a different angle. We are looking for originality.

I have a little maxim in my mind when I am producing stuff and it is how would the Coen brothers do this because I find them the most interesting of artists that are producing work at the moment. What I always find with their work is that they are constantly surprising you, you are going one way and then they will do this about-turn, but it will be totally truthful. You can sort of go with it because they will take the rug from under you and you go in a different place, but there is always a truth about it, or very rarely do they get that wrong. So that's the sort of maxim I have, that the Coen brothers always surprise me. That is what I am looking for in any drama that I am watching. Surprise me. The biggest thing, the biggest ‑ I don't want to be bored. If I read a script. I just don't want to be bored. Life is too short. I am an old geezer and I don't want to waste my time on stuff that's really, really boring or reading stuff. So just, please, make it surprising.

Submissions for The Alfred Bradley Bursary Award 2023 will open for applications for writers resident in the North of England from 12 noon on Monday 27th February 2023 and close at 12 noon on Tuesday 11th April 2023

Find out more and meet the previous winners of the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award

Download and read scripts by previous winners and runners-up in the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award:

Monique and Me by Jill O'Halloran

Human Resources by Piers Black

Shamed by Furquan Akhtar

Hangdog by Cat Jones

Abigail Adams by Mark Shand

Visit our Radio Drama Script Library to download and read many more scripts