2020 has been an extraordinary year. We’re all living in a horror of sorts. And although the creative process is never smooth, little did we know how much our innovative audio project with Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Research and Development would be affected by the current crisis. Less known still was how, like a snake eating its own tail, art would imitate life. We began the creation of Monster, written by welsh playwright Brad Birch with the intention of hosting it as a one-off installation at Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Cymru Wales' newly opened Central Square. We were going to create a theatrical ‘haunted house’ experience incorporating the latest technology whilst utilising everyday devices to make an immersive sensory drama about a global pandemic in which homes become invaded by the undesired.

Fast forward to an unprecedented Covid world and the whole nation finds themselves effectively trapped in their homes through lockdown. So with a bit of recalibration, and via Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Taster, we are now able to bring the monsters to the listeners. We are enabling you to create your own ‘haunted house’ within your own home.

Monster is a lights down, listen closely, innovative drama that can be experienced from the comfort of your living room. Though quite how comfortable you’ll be will depend on how much you want to immerse yourself in the drama - connect more devices & position them where you want in order to orchestrate the level of horror. You make your own unique experience without ever having to step outside! 

Here’s the writer, Brad Birch’s own take on the project:

As a scriptwriter, it’s rare to be learning the technical capabilities of a medium whilst writing for it. As tempting as it was to use every tool and trick available to us, it felt important that Monster was more than just a parlour game. We all felt the experience had to be rooted in story, and that the characters and the world had to be vivid enough for this to be able to stand on its own as an audio drama. We couldn’t allow ourselves to think we could paper over cracks with flashy technology, and we also understood that the best showcase for multi-device orchestration would be with an engaging story.

I think horror is the perfect genre for this kind of technology. Horror changes our relationship to our environment. When I was a kid, my bedroom always used to give off a weird kind of hostility whenever I’d read a Stephen King before sleep. And the living room felt that little bit colder whenever I used to stay up late and watch a movie like Blair Witch. Or at least that’s how it felt. It’s not that the spaces became more alive, it’s that I became more aware of their deadness, of the fact that I, with my breathing and movement, was a disturbance. I had unsettled the order of the room. As a genre, horror sets fire to our senses. The creaks and groans of the house become part of the experience. Horror affects the whole body – it’s the perfect genre for pushing the boundaries of what is possible in this medium.

I wanted to write a story that would evoke the kinds of ghost stories I grew up with. Stories about haunted houses tend to be about order and disorder, things out of place. This is the story of a mother and a daughter in crisis, trying to make sense of what has happened to them while the world around them - and around the audience - turns upside down.

The show had a necessarily long gestation, allowing for back and forths between us and technical team – sharing and responding to ideas, offering solutions and finding new ways of thinking about how we all do our jobs. As the writer on the project I knew I had to be adaptable. I had to be prepared to be told that some things wouldn’t be possible and have to scale back. But in actual fact, I found that the majority of the conversations were about pushing further, adding more, testing limits. I think we’re at a really exciting moment for audio drama. There were things that were possible but we decided against using on this project, so I look forward to whatever comes out next.

Experience Monster for yourself now on the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Taster website or Listen on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Sounds

Find out more about creating Monster on the R&D blog

I have a fuzzy memory of being around eight-years-old, sitting in front of a computer screen practically half the size of my entire body, staving off tears of frustration. Despite typing into the keyboard as many verbs as my childhood brain could muster, nothing seemed to get me out of the ‘pitch black room’ that was supposedly ‘spinning very gently’ around my head.

Those of you familiar with the of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy may appreciate my frustration (though I’m guessing you probably got a lot further than the initial dark bedroom!) That was my first taste of interactive storytelling, and since then I’ve become increasingly interested in the medium, particularly how it hands over a degree of creative control to the ‘player’, giving them the opportunity to influence the narrative for better… or for worse. Instead of passively digesting entertainment, interactive stories endow us with a level of control, forcing us to engage with the characters and their journeys on a much deeper level: creatively, psychologically and sometimes even morally. Black Mirror’s characteristically dystopian episode is a perfect example of this. Whether you liked it as a form or not, I’m sure a lot of us were left questioning our own moral compass by the end. We reflect on the story as a viewer, but the interactive element means the direction of the story also reflects on us.

I was called into a Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ writing workshop last year, under the ambiguous understanding it had something to do with A.I. My first reaction was one of shock, um…I think you mean someone else, right? After all, I generally write comedy / drama, and my technical abilities basically extend to turning a laptop off and on again when it’s frozen. As far as A.I. is concerned, the advancement of robots properly freaks me out and somewhere deep down I do sort of think, in spite of all its incredible achievements, that we’ll inevitably exploit technology until it outsmarts us; leading to our ultimate downfall. I mean, if Hollywood sci-fis have taught us anything…it’s that…right?

However, I was pretty relieved to discover that this particular workshop had nothing to do with summoning the likes of into the writers' room. Instead, we were to learn how to use a new piece of programming software, called Charisma.ai, in order to write a two-hander interactive story to be played online.

Charisma.ai is a platform that enables writers to intuitively program character dialogue and player responses through a series of connected nodes. The result is essentially a narrative-driven conversation, that is somewhere between a traditional chatbot (check out ) and a choose your own adventure. Despite sounding a bit complicated (and it definitely was a learning process to get to grips with), the basics were relatively fast to learn and I’m pleased to say there were surprisingly few moments of slamming the computer keyboard like an eight-year-old.

At the end of the two-day workshop we were asked to pitch potential story ideas that would be made for the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Taster online platform. I wracked my brain for something that played into my strengths (no sci-fi then!) and pitched a comedy idea called The Act. The premise is that the ‘player’ is the Artist Manager of a world-renowned popstar, who is shortly due to perform a big arena gig…but has gone AWOL. The ‘player’ needs to get to the bottom of the popstar’s problem and to convince them to perform. If the ‘player’ is successful then the popstar will perform, but there are various other roads to go down and different outcomes, some more ridiculous than others! I wanted to introduce a level of jeopardy into the mix – that the ‘player’ will potentially lose their reputation and have to face the fans’ wrath if they don’t manage to convince the popstar to perform. This is partly to motivate the ‘player’ to keep invested in the story and also to up the tension and excitement, so they feel that there is something at stake.

I wanted to flesh out the popstar role, ‘Zeejee’, as a three-dimensional, nuanced character, with various quirks and hang-ups. He is charming and funny, but insecure about his abilities as a singer and can sometimes be overly-dramatic and petulant. From time to time, ‘Zeejee’ resembles the stereotypical diva-ish popstar, with ridiculous demands on his rider and the need for constant reassurance. But ultimately, the ‘player’ has the opportunity to get to know the real man behind the façade. We never see ‘Zeejee’, as the interaction is all through typing, so I had to work hard to bring him to life in other ways - one of which was by hearing him sing a section of his new song, after the ‘player’ helps him come up with some new lyrics.

It’s taken me slightly longer than originally anticipated to write The Act, for a few reasons (…and for once it had nothing to do with self-discipline…although my living room is always curiously clean when there’s a deadline!) One of the challenges is you need to program many diverse responses for ‘Zeejee’, to respond to whatever the ‘player’ types, and it’s almost impossible to second guess what someone might write. So I took a good amount of time coming up with a range of reactions. When programming the potential ‘player’ responses, there’s the option of inputting a ‘wildcard’ node, which accounts for any unanticipated phrases or words. It’s important to make the ‘character’ responses to these wildcards sound specific and tailored.

It’s hard to road-test your own story, as inevitably your own mind works in a specific way and someone else’s is entirely different. Helpfully, The Act was sent out to some people for play-testing, who kindly looked for any bugs, problems in the programming, or strange moments in the dialogue. Fingers crossed anything like this has been ironed out! Top tip: if you break the game, you could always try turning it off and on again?!

It’s been a really enjoyable experience getting to grips with this piece of technology and learning a new skill. I wonder if interactive storytelling really is the way forward for mainstream media, in dramas, sitcoms and films?

Broadly speaking, we’ve become accustomed to having zero input when watching TV / online programmes, other than to turn the volume up. With the development of A.I. in storytelling (including Virtual Reality), we’ll soon have the ability to dictate the direction of our favourite drama, whilst sensorially being a part of it too. In terms of audience enjoyment, I suppose it depends on what you’re after - whether you want that level of agency and immersion. I recently watched cheerleading documentary on Netflix (hope it’s not blasphemy to mention Netflix on a Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ platform?!) and my god, I would not want to have any interactive part to play in that series. Not unless I had hefty health insurance and a history of being tossed into the air like a devil stick and landing to tell the tale.

But there is something in the thrill of losing yourself in an interactive story. In the chance to step out of your own shoes for a moment and walk in another’s. To speak to characters and temporarily live in worlds you may never otherwise experience. Socially, it may even help build empathy and understand each other’s perspectives a little better… or perhaps it’ll create a league of amoral sociopaths…who knows!

For now, using Charisma AI has given me a fantastic opportunity to explore a different form and discover that, ultimately, the player has as much of a part to play as the writer as I do.

There’s something weirdly fulfilling and freeing about that.

Try The Act, written by Alys Metcalf on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Taster

Try Catfish, written by Sonia Jalaly on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Taster

Find out more on a blog post by R&D Producer Sophie Sampson

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a storyteller. But having had my lack of directing skills ruin a number of decent short scripts, I finally had the humbling epiphany that maybe I wasn't meant to be the one calling the shots whilst behind the camera. And so I decided to stick to screenwriting - something, I felt, that I was at least passable at. And having had scripts get to the full read-through stage and receive positive feedback in both the comedy and drama script windows of the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Writersroom, as well as getting shortlisted, or placing in other writing opportunities I gained confidence that like Craig David, I was ‘Born To Do It’.

But writing for a kid's show? Nah, surely not me. Which is actually a weird thing for me to say because my work tends to be concerned with the issues that young people face. I love the raw emotions that youngsters display, before society and adulthood gets them to suppress their feelings - they can laugh at the funniest joke anyone has ever told, cry at the saddest story anyone will ever hear and fall in and out of love with their soul mate - and they can do all of that before they’ve had their first mouthful of Corn Flakes. But when I heard about an opportunity to write online content for CΒι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ’S drama, The Dumping Ground I have to be honest and admit, I was not sure I was the right fit. 

At this moment I feel I should bring it back for just a second, and tell you how this opportunity landed on my lap. - not only is she 'The Dumping Ground’s' casting director but, in another, admittedly lesser-known role, she is also my Ambassador of Quan - I call Sue this every time I see her, despite having my doubts about whether she has ever even seen , and even if she has I reckon she does not remember Cuba Gooding Jr's character using that term in it. But calling her that is better than screaming ‘Show me the money’ each time we meet. Anyway, I met Sue through my 9-5, which thankfully happens to be adjacent to the creative industry. I eventually spoke to her about the fact that I'm an aspiring screenwriter, in a genuinely conversational, non thirsty kind of way. Sue, perhaps thanks to my not being pushy, then asked to read one of my scripts. I wasn’t sure she would be a fan but I was wrong. Not only did she love it, but she stuck her neck out by mentioning it to various producer friends of hers, which has led to that project getting an option with . As I said, she’s my Ambassador of Quan.

Sue then mentioned my writing to The Dumping Ground’s Exec Producer, who was kind enough to give me advice about some of the opportunities that open up for new voices on the show. At this point I felt that I should really get acquainted with the show. So one weekend I blitzed a whole load on the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iPlayer. For those of you who don’t know, The Dumping Ground is set in a kid's care home, and was given the name by perhaps its most well-known, former resident, Tracy Beaker. As the show stars children from the most broken of homes serious issues are never far from the fore. With its disparate group of characters and thought provoking issues, the show kind of reminded me of , a programme which I can still quote from, despite having not seen an episode in over 20 years. Clearly Byker had a strong impact on me, and I could see how The DG could have a similar effect on today’s younger generation. The show finds a way for its big laughs and tear-jerking moments to sit alongside one another, without ever appearing jarring. A feature I try to incorporate in my writing. “Make them laugh, Make them cry…”

So when the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Writersroom - at the urging, I’m sure, of The Dumping Ground’s Exec' - alerted me to the fact that they were looking for writers to work on an online spin-off entitled, MyDG, I was by then a fan of the show, and I knew I had to give my all to be involved.

The aim of this spin off was to have a character give a retelling of a storyline from each episode via a voiceover, and for this retelling to give the audience a new perspective on what they had just seen. All this was to be done in a social media format - I guess like what you would see on an Instagram story. Oh, and this all had to be done within one minute. This opportunity is an example of how shows are continuing to increase their online presence, keeping fans hooked by allowing them to engage with original extra content, and (just as importantly!) providing us writers with additional opportunities to work with the characters and world in a creative environment. So, I threw my hat into the ring, by pitching two MyDG episodes based on previously aired episodes of the show. Thankfully the team liked what I sent them and called me in for an interview, and then they liked me in person and so I was commissioned to write the first 12 episodes of MyDG. After getting sent previews of all 12 episodes of the current series, I had to pitch which character I wanted to write for, and what angle I would take. And that’s when the really hard work began.

Now I know what you’re thinking because I thought the same - one minute to tell a story? I’d be able to knock these out in my sleep. Especially as I had a half-hour episode to draw from for inspiration. But that thought process led to my first mistake. The self-congratulatory pats on the back I gave myself when completing a first draft quickly morphed into something more violent when I realised I hadn’t just allowed myself to be inspired by the main episode, but had fallen into the trap of simply writing an abridged version. I was tasked with giving a fresh perspective. The only way the audience was going to go online and watch my creation was if they felt that MyDG was giving them bonus material, that was not to be found in the main broadcast. A truncated version of what they had just seen wouldn’t cut the mustard.

And so to allow the characters a fresh take on the episode I employed the , where no two accounts of the same event will ever be identical. And to set this in motion I imagined how the characters might relay the event if they met a friend outside of The Dumping Ground over a couple of pints… of milkshake. This allowed for their personal motivations to influence their retelling, and helped give me that fresh look we were all looking for.

With this being my first CΒι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ commission, I was obviously keen on making a good impression. The way to do that, I told myself, was to let loose with some million dollar, showy writing. Flip the characters, on their head, and show a side to them that might not have existed previously. Really put my stamp on the show. That would be good right? Wrong. The reinventing of a character was not my job. What I wrote had to fit into a universe that existed long before I joined it, and will carry on long after I have left it. For the brief moment I was part of it my job was to be a custodian of these characters and leave them in a good place for the next step on their journey. Sometimes the best way to make a good impression is by just simply sprinkling a dash of salt on to what is already a well prepared dish.

So, just a few months after hearing about this opportunity, I had pitched, interviewed, got commissioned, and written 12 x 1 minute long episodes, all of which I am really proud of. And these episodes cover topics that range from losing a parent, relationships, pressures of social media… basically, a lot of heavyweight issues. So in that short space of time what did I learn?

• Children’s TV is not to be sniffed at. It definitely required some adjustments from me, but once these were made I found that young people naturally provide a rich source of drama and comedy, and for a writer, both of these go hand in hand. And as an audience young people's tastes are as sophisticated and demanding (perhaps even more so) than adults.

• Sometimes what we write does not have to be perfect - This is slightly controversial, but as writing is such a collaborative process, sometimes it makes sense to just get your ideas out there, even if you feel they are not quite on point, rather than struggling (and more than likely failing) to get them to that perfect state where we all feel they should be. A fresh pair of eyes reading your work will bring fresh ideas, that will allow your story to get to a place that might be different from the one you had imagined, but is more often than not infinitely better. Just get it done and get it out there. Remember, a half decent, finished script is of more use than a half finished banger!

• ABN - Always Be Networking. I know that like pitching, networking is something that fills so many of us writers with dread. Especially as the word networking is so often followed by the word event! I get it, it all feels so forced. But the fact of the matter is that no one will be more passionate about your voice and your work than you. So do it. All the time. Until it's organic, and feels as natural as you talking about what you had for dinner. At that stage you might find yourself casually talking to a friend who you would never normally dream of networking or pitching to, and that friend might become your Ambassador of Quan.

• And (this is one thing that I didn’t really touch on above) the importance of writing in a character's voice - No matter how good your story is, if the voice it is written in is not quite there, the audience will not be able to buy into it. So if you are ever invited to write for a continuing show, engrain yourself into it. Read the scripts. Watch the extra online content. Get to know the nuances of each character. That extra work can be the difference between hearing ‘mmm, something doesn’t feel right’ to hearing ‘that’s a really solid draft.’

Watch MyDG now on the CΒι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ website - whole series (episodes are unlocked after each episode of The Dumping Ground is broadcast)

Join in the conversation and read the character's replies to each episode