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Is this a golden age for digital storytelling?

Hands up who doesn’t love a good yarn, a gossip, a decent anecdote? Yep, we like peering in to the lives of others, imagining ourselves in their shoes, living another life. We love empathising with people – real and fictional; we cry with them, laugh at them, and gawp in absolute horror sometimes. In other words, we all love a good story.

If you listen to The Untold on Radio 4 you'll know that we are telling a story in real time, not after it’s happened. Like life itself – we don’t know how are stories will end when we start out.

To mark 100 editions of the series, we bought together the producers from the show with other storytellers that are making a real difference to the way we consume stories for The Untold Storytelling Festival. Factual storytellers like Jennifer Forde who made the hit true crime podcast West Cork, screenwriter Jed Mercurio who gave us Bodyguard and Line of Duty – stories that seem so real and yet are fictional, Laurie Nunn who gave us the revealing series Sex Education and author Chibundu Onuzo. You can hear what they said about storytelling in the digital age, in The Untold Storytelling Festival.

It's a great listen but for a sneak preview – here are 8 reasons why we might be living through a golden age of digital storytelling:

Grace Dent, presenter of The Untold

We’ve fallen back in love with long stories

  • In print it was the hefty tomes like War & Peace that banished the long, late Victorian nights – now we are prepared to binge-watch 70 hours of Game of Thrones or six series of Line of Duty. Gone are the three and four part dramas or one off radio programme – give me a podcast that runs and runs, the commute will fly by. All thanks to Apps on the smartphone that mean that your radio and TV follow you wherever you go.

We like intimacy in storytelling

  • Headphones are back – we listen and watch more on our own, and the storyteller is right in our head. This is storytelling that is whispered, chatted about, or confessed, not declaimed and “broadcast” – this is the age of talking to one person, not an audience.

We like unreliable narrators and protagonists, even though we don’t trust them

  • Veteran David Budd, Jed Mercurio’s tortured veteran in Bodyguard is a complicated man – we see the story through his eyes – but is he a good guy? You could say Hamlet was an unreliable narrator too, so what’s new? In the context of our world of fake news and fractured political narratives, we seem to lap up complication and equivocation – we don’t want good vs evil anymore. We are less to be or not to be – but more to trust or not to trust.

We like predicaments that we can relate to

  • The Untold is as successful as it is because it portrays real lives and decisions that can change a life forever – what would you do in the same situation?
Jed Mercurio, screenwriter

We like fiction that seems true

  • We are in a time where storytelling – fact and fiction – seem to be coming together, drama has to be real or made as realistic as possible and…

We like truth told as though it is fiction

  • When we hear real life stories, we want them presented in a way that grips us. That’s why true crime is so popular. Serial, S-Town and The Untold all use techniques from drama and the novel to hook you in…because…

We like cliff hangers

  • In the multi-part world, the end of an episode is a dangerous place for storytellers – the audience might not come back for the next. So, on the sofa, when you get to the end of an episode of your favourite Friday night TV show, try to spot how hard the writer or producer is working to intrigue you into coming back next time. Jed Mercurio in Line of Duty is the wizard of the cliff-hanger. But…

How to tell a story

Start with a hook, make a connection and include a twist. Watch Josie Long's guide to great storytelling.

We like a good ending

  • When it’s time to say goodbye, we want the dozens of eyeball hours we have dedicated to the series to be rewarded with a fitting climax – is the true crime case solved? Are the white walkers defeated? Don’t just leave me hanging on unless…maybe there is going to be another bullet point to this article…
Contributors to The Untold's Storytelling Festival

Written by Philip Sellars, Executive Editor of the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ’s radio documentaries unit.

The Untold Storytelling Festival is broadcast on Radio 4, this Saturday at 8pm.

More from The Untold on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4