Radio Drama (and Other Anomalies)

This will be a bit tangental, so I apologise for the cognitive disonance you may experience. Just buckle up and enjoy the ride. 

When I was in the middle of my childhood private eye/detective phase (which I haven't yet grown out of) I reached the end of my Raymond Chandler books and found myself hungry for more. Chandler used the English language in a way no one else ever has or ever could. He made words both blunt and sharp enough to cut deep.

"Fate stage-managed the whole thing"

"From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away."

"He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor."

"Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off."

It's one to thing to say "The blonde looked sexy", but it was Chandler who said "It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window."

First edition of Farewell My Lovely, the source of the famous 'bishop window' line.

Why my parents let me read his stuff in high school, I have no idea. The humour and wit of it was addictive.

These pages were oozing sexually promiscuous femme fatales and that unforgettable scene of Marlowe finding a nude woman in his bed. She enraged him. It sure as hell shocked me the way he reacted. If it was James Bond or any other male protagonist he would've bedded her. But not Marlowe - and I suppose that's one of the reasons I adore the character.

Chandler died in 1959, leaving behind a plethora of what could have been. As such I inevitably hit the end of the Marlowe novel and short stories series, which made me greatly depressed for some time. I resorted to rereading the series again and again.

A young Steven Fry. Just kidding! Raymond Chandler looking dapper as always.
(It was this or him with a pipe, really)

It was during my third or fourth rereading of The Big Sleep that my dad came in with a CD collection he had ordered online. This was back when online ordering was relatively new and Amazon.com was the promised land for books for us petty folk on that easily ignored island at the bottom of the globe beside that other easily ignored group of islands. I held this purple odd-sized CD case and thought 'Sweet! Black and White movies!' (I wasn't a normal teenager). As it turns out, it was a mass of audios that were produced in the 40's and 50's from the Golden Age of radio drama. It had The Shadow, Dragnet, Dick Tracy, Sherlock Holmes, but more importantly it had Philip Marlowe. Happy day!

I'll try and spare my gushing about Marlowe for another post and cut right to the chase. Turns out I loved the audios. The fact they were done half a century ago didn't phase me - that's actually a plus in my eyes. I was listening to history not just a Philip Marlowe story. I was putting the CDs in my portable CD player (remember those?) and listened to every single radio drama like an addict. I had just started driving at the time so I also listened in my car, much to my enjoyment and the dismay of my passengers. 

It was called an Old Time Forgotten Radio collection. I never thought of the stories as old, like I don't think of Casablanca as an old film - it's timeless! And these stories weren't forgotten, just being rediscovered.

Today, I listen to several different audio drama series. Some old, like Bulldog Drummond or The Navy Lark. Some new, like Quantum Door and Minister of Chance. And some constant, like The Archers or Doctor Who. 

A full house of Classic Doctors (Doctors in the house...?) continuing their adventures with Big Finish Productions

When listening to Big Finish's Doctor Who audios, it's a little difficult not to picture the already well-photographed and beloved incarnations of the Doctor rather than the grey-haired, more senior but no less beloved actors who play the Doctors. Yes, present tense due to the fact that although their tenure on TV has ended, the characters are still happening on audio. Yes, I am that fussy with my tenses. The advantage to having minimal exposure to the tremendously huge number of talented British actors out there is that I have no idea who previously starred in slapstick comedy and is currently trying to play a Bond Villainesque character with their finger on the 'Blow up the Universe' button. I couldn't point them out in a crowd of one, in other words. So it genuinely feels like the Doctor is encountering total strangers all the time rather than 'that bloke from Eastenders'.

While I'm rabbiting on about British audio drama it would be terribly remiss of me to not to rabbit on about the Minister of Chance. This is a spin-off from 'Death Comes to Time', a Doctor Who audio featuring the Seventh Doctor and Steven Fry as the aforementioned Chancy Minister. Now said Minister is in the talented and capable hands of Julian Wadham. Before I go on to sum up the general premise, let me give you a feel for it with this honest-to-goodness exchange I had with a friend while on lunch break. I had listened to a rather heated scene in the episode titled Paludin Fields, and for reasons that will become clear I had a rather broad grin on my face. It wasn't the first time that week I had been grinning from ear to ear during a rather stressful day and apparantly this baffled my friends  to no end:

FRIEND: What are you smiling about?

ME: Have you ever heard Paul McGann’s voice? It’s like the audible equivalent of crack cocaine.

FRIEND: I thought it was caffeine making you happy.

ME: Nope. Paul McGann’s voice.

Actually, there's a whole lot more to say about The Minister of Chance. The sound design is beautiful. It's audio art at its finest and I can't reccomend it enough. If an entirely empty art gallery only played the soundscape from this series it might be the greatest work of art anyone could experience. The entire cast seem like they're all born for their roles and it's hard to say who steals the show as they all have equally relevant parts with equally powerful dialogue. It's like someone sat down and wrote a mathematical formula for a highly addictive audible sensation and the answer was The Minister of Chance. It was then I discovered just how many people my age and younger enjoyed audio drama as much as I do. They might have skipped over the Golden Age but they embrace the new stuff. Like a Classic Whovian with New Whovians at a Sci-Fi convention. Same destination, different journey. Countless nerdy things to discuss!

Why am I talking so indepth about The Minister of Chance when I've rather breezed over everything else? Well, Minister of Chance is professionally produced, but it's produced almost entirely by its fans.  If you want to look into it a bit more, check out the website where you can download episodes entirely free of charge (thanks to donators). Enjoy the audible equivalent of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. If you like what you hear, perhaps spare what you can or aquire some awesome merch to help the series continue!

The audio equivalent of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

And now a disclaimer:

Before you think I'm an Anglophile of sorts, bear in mind I think William Shatner's voice is pretty damn good too. I could listen to him speak all day. And a wonderful Australian voice would be Anthony Warlow. If he isn't entrancing people with his warm operatic baritone on stage, he's making them melt with his wonderfully smooth honey-like voice. Fortunately he is at present gracing the boards on Broadway so more people can enjoy his dulcet tones. If I could get all three to do one audio drama, it may culminate in the greatest sound known to mankind - and the world might explode.

Long story short, yeah it's not million-dollar budget blockbusters, but neither are books. And like books they let the imagination go about as crazy as a Beatles video clip. Each experience is individual. Each time you hit 'repeat' you get a different feel for it. Audio drama provides the sound, you create your own blockbuster.