Archive: Book Reviews, May 2003
Writing for Radio
By Vincent McInerney
Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-7190-5843-0. xii + 276pp. £14.99 (pbk), £40.00 (hbk)
A Review by Martin Shingler, Staffordshire University, UK
In later life, many people get the urge to write for radio, turning their ideas and experiences into drama, documentaries, short stories and poems. For these people Vincent McInerney's Writing for Radio may prove invaluable or at least well worth £14.99. Intelligently written and clearly structured, it provides insightful observations, examples and exercises, along with practical techniques for developing ideas into scripts. Working independently, readers of this book can use it as a comprehensive crash course in radio writing. Meanwhile, those taking evening-classes in creative writing can use it as an accompanying textbook should they wish to adapt their work to radio. It offers both the independent and the evening-class reader inspiration, encouragement and practical advice. It includes extracts from classic literature and classic radio programmes as well as suggested scenarios that readers can develop into scripts of their own. Examples of script lay-out and presentation are provided for readers, enabling professional-looking scripts to be produced that can be submitted to the BBC. Tutors who run evening-classes on creative writing will find this useful to recommend to their students. They can also use it as a template for their own sessions on radio-writing and adopt some of the exercises for their classes.
On the final page of his book, Vincent McInerney states that older people make better writers than young people: a comforting thought for those coming to radio-writing late in life. Not so comforting, of course, for younger college and university students, who are more likely to find this disheartening. They may also find his references to classic rather than contemporary popular literature off-putting. Consequently, tutors of radio writing courses with predominantly 17-22 year old students may be less enthusiastic about recommending this book than tutors with more mature students.
One of the biggest problems facing the tutor of a college or university radio course is that young students will all too readily assume that radio is an old-fashioned medium, irrelevant and unexciting compared to television or cinema. Moreover, only a minority of young students listen regularly to the programme forms discussed in this book: radio dramas, documentaries, short stories, comedy and poetry. In the UK, BBC Radio 4 has long provided the main outlet for these and the audience of this station hardly needs converting to the joys of literary radio. Fans of Radio 4 are rarely under thirty years of age, which means that twenty-somethings eager to write for the mass media need substantial encouragement to write for radio. Comedy, particularly On the Town with the League of Gentlemen and Chris Morris's Blue Jam tend to fire their imagination and inspire them. Of the 'classics' only The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy remains inspirational for young listeners. It's not just comedy that has the power to do this though. Lee Hall's Spoonface Steinberg ordinarily engages student interest in the dramatic potential of radio. It is certainly more likely to achieve this than Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood or Ewan McColl and Charles Parker's Radio Ballads. Unfortunately new and young radio writing talent is not strongly represented in McInerney's book. Moreover, his examples of 'mindvisible' (i.e. graphic and imaginative) writing, namely Dickens' David Copperfield and Tolstoy's War and Peace would need to be replaced by something along the lines of Bridget Jones' Diary or JK Rowling's Harry Potter books to inspire younger writers.
Vincent McInerney's Writing for Radio will be most appreciated by an older readership that has long since discovered the joys of BBC Radio 4. A younger generation of college and university students will no doubt find this less than inspirational and be better served by a book of the same title by Shaun MacLoughlin and republished by How To Books in 2001. At half the length (147 pages) and almost half the price (£8.99), this Writing for Radio book may appeal more to younger students. It may still lack references to Bridget Jones, Harry Potter and Spoonface Steinberg but it does have a chapter on writing comedy and its small comic drawings give it the impression of being a more student-friendly read.