Contemporary British and Italian Sound Docudrama: Traditions and Innovations

By Sabina Macchiavelli

The book focuses on radio and sound docufiction and docudrama through comparative analysis of the British and the Italian output from post war years to the 2010s, from both a historical and formal point of view. It sheds light on a rather neglected area of study providing a systematic survey of the development of the form and of its current status and perspectives, and at the same time constructing viable analytical tools that can be used to investigate individual productions.

Considering the different docudramatic output in formats and quantity in the two countries, the book explores case studies from BBC Radio, which continue to air a high number of programmes with a great variety of formats and subgenres, and Italian case studies from both independent bodies and the Radio RAI, whose docudramatic production has declined since the late 1980s.

Specifically, the study seeks to explain how radio language in its purely acoustic dimension allows access to unpredictable layers of truth often complementary, when not overtly alternative, to the documental truth of declaredly journalistic or scientific programmes.

A well-researched resource for university students, scholars, researchers and educators in media, sociology of media and history. In-depth analysis of an original topic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: May 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781789387278

Book preview

Introduction

Preface

In 1974, a curious title appeared in an article of Radiocorriere Tv, the Italian equivalent to the Radio Times. It read ‘Pray come out of history and speak to the microphone!’ (Libera 1974: 16–17, translation added) and the article celebrated the launch of a new Radio Audizioni Italiane (RAI) radio series, Interviste Impossibili (‘Impossible interviews’) (1974–75), in which great contemporary writers and intellectuals – Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco and Pier Paolo Pasolini among others – carried out fake interviews to outstanding figures of history ‘of all times and all countries’ (1974: 17, translation added), as the subhead recited. The occurrence is doubly intriguing. The 1970s are an age of great experimentation on Italian radio, particularly in the area of documentary and drama, and the programme is situated within this budding trend. Even more importantly, the article suggests the oxymoronic nature of this series and other formats which span different typologies almost inextricably.

According to radio producer and critic Lorenzo Pavolini, the invitation contained in the title is a rhetorical device – ‘a metaphor’ (2018, translation added) – introducing the audience to a new experience in historical investigation, and he himself quotes it at the beginning of his essay prefacing the Interviste impossibili printed collection (Pavolini in Pavolini 2006: ix) to illustrate the mechanism in action in the programmes. The original ‘good wheeze’ (2006: ix, translation added), unique in the panorama of post-war Italian culture (2006: xxii), consisted of a recorded dialogue between the writer playing the part of themselves as the interviewer, and an actress/actor playing the historical character. Technically, being entirely scripted and acted out, the programme can be categorized as radio drama and indeed Pavolini (2013: 62–70) includes the Interviste in a chapter on radio drama in his memoir Si sente in fondo?.Yet conceptually the series raises a paradox that, as we shall see, lies at the core of all audio docudramatic productions, and that the title of the article aptly epitomizes: the possibility to draw people and events out of the discourse of historicism and let them speak directly to our ear, in a one-to-one relationship. The words also implicitly suggest that, if we let them do so, they might gift us some unheralded revelation. Contextualized within the ‘interviews’ in which the man of Neanderthal or Charles Dickens do actually talk to an interlocutor, the quotation encapsulates the belief that through an act of imagination the sound matter can distil a form of truth from documented reality. A similar notion lies at the basis of the present study which aims to demonstrate that the coming together of factuality and fiction through treatment in sound may disclose unexpected meanings not only emotionally involving but also conceptually engaging.

Interviste impossibili is part of an outstanding tradition that has steadily evolved since the 1950s, yet radio (audio) crossbreed forms remain a neglected field. In recent years media have witnessed a surge of interest in productions which purport to portray real situations and people through a form of re-enactment of historical or biographical events involving the manipulation of documentary material with varying degrees of dramatization, adaptation and fictionalization, and blending together strands of meaning from different districts of human knowledge. In film and television and, to a lesser degree perhaps, in the theatre, a genre in its own right has taken shape under the critics’ magnifying glass, endowed with various names, the most comprehensive of all probably being ‘docudrama’ or ‘docufiction’. In a 2006 article for the Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, Paget traces the roots of the debate about what he considers a sub-genre in television broadcasting – documentary drama or drama documentary – back to 1980.¹ Very little exploration has so far been conducted into the radio equivalent, a type of programmes that, situating itself along the opaque and unstable boundary between fact and fiction, seems perfectly suited to a medium which makes the ephemeral nature of sound and the evanescence of perception its main strengths. Arguably, despite the number of remarkable productions throughout the history of radio, their fluctuating quality coupled with the natural impermanence of sound has made audio docudrama at the same time too vast a subject to explore and too complex a concept to encapsulate. But such comprehensiveness and ambivalence also account for the challenge radio docudrama represents for media studies. The double ambiguity that characterizes it – concerning the form (the fact–fiction blend) and the matter (sound) – produces resonances in terms of knowledge and perception of reality that make it infinitely enriching both for creativity and for thought. Central to the topic is the question of how sound acts upon the mixture of documents and imaginative narration/exposition and in this way allows for an alternative understanding to the one avowedly granted by factual broadcasts, for example documentary reportage and news programmes. At times, such action may result in a subversion of accepted knowledge. In this respect, sound docufiction moves about the same territory explored by poetry and art towards a polysemous comprehension of reality. Indeed, the revelatory strength of docufiction has more to do with the emotional and intellectual authenticity of people and events rather than with an explanation of reality of a scientific type. This is also what permits to perceive a demarcation line in relation to journalistic productions pivoting on notions of objectivity.

Considerations on genre

In order to understand what radio docudrama allows access to that is not possible in other media two related frames of reference can be brought together. The first is the Janus-faced character of the genre, which has been the object of much theorization in visual media studies (e.g. Rosenthal 1999; Paget 1998; Formenti 2014; Minier and Pennacchia 2014). Positioning itself at the crossroads of fact and fiction, docudrama lacks the intelligibility that other formats appear to have. It cannot be considered – or assert its right to be considered – a reliable source of information, like current affairs programmes or the news, or documentary proper, nor does it present a totally imaginative world listeners can leisurely build upon, such as literary adaptations or drama itself. It may well be that, as some critics contend, its twofold character makes docudrama challenging and at the same time infinitely enriching (cf. Dottorini 2013; Street 2012; Morawski and Vincenti 2011).

Before being an attribute of hybrid formats, ambiguity appears to be inherent in the nature (and notion) of ‘genre’ itself. One way of viewing it is as a prescriptive constraint that establishes a limit in the form of ‘norms and interdictions’ (Derrida 1992: 224) and drags along an urge to overcome it. What one risks in crossing the ‘line of demarcation’ (1992: 224) is ‘impurity, anomaly or monstruosity’ (1992: 225). As Guido Mattia Gallerani points out, ‘in order to counterbalance the genre’s repressive attitude, the work displays a counter-law of its own’ (2016: 70, translation added). At the heart of the law of genre Derrida (1992: 227) locates ‘a law of impurity or a principle of contamination’, which he calls ‘the law of the law of genre’ (1992: 227). This is the place where the paradoxical nature of genre is more apparent because it implies that an artistic or literary work² takes part in it without being part of (or a member of) it. The trait itself that makes it possible to attribute a textual event to a certain class – ‘the identifiable recurrence of a common trait by which one recognizes, or should recognize, a membership in a class’ (1992: 228) – is a generic mark. That is, it does not refer to any specific genre: an occurrence of what the critic indicates as, paraphrasing, ‘belonging without belonging’. Derrida seems to suggest that the ‘without’ is indeed the key to an understanding of a work of art. In the very moment when we catch a glimpse of its non-belonging, the work discloses all its possible worlds of signification. The simultaneous effect of such trait or mark of (not) belonging is that a text does not specifically fit in any one genre:

Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text, there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging. And not because of an abundant overflowing or a free, anarchic and unclassifiable productivity, but because of the trait of participation itself. […] In marking itself generically, a text unmarks itself [se démarque].

(1992: 230, original emphasis)

The notion of hybridism is thus established. The law of the law of genre carries in itself ‘a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy’ (1992: 227) which reshapes the borders of a given typology so as to produce ‘by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole’ (1992: 228). It is within this at the same time contained and ever-shifting space that the miraculous prolificacy of the work of art takes place, since ‘the consequences of this division and of this overflowing remain as singular as they are limitless’ (1992: 228).

In post-structuralist analysis, genres are outlined as a regulatory framework applied to the unseizable, magmatic occurrences of language, the singular items of which never seem to be in accordance with each other. Adopting Jean-François Lyotard’s (1988) vocabulary, a ‘phrase’ constituted according to (and characterized by) a specific ‘regimen’ – a set of rules – is not permeable by another one which is constructed under a different regulatory system. In their reciprocal relation, phrases are constantly caught up in a ‘differend’, a conflict that can only be solved through the application of ‘a rule of judgement’ (Lyotard 1988: xi) common to both parties. The function of genres of discourse is precisely to ‘supply rules for linking together heterogeneous phrases’ (1988: xii) in the name of the attainment of ‘certain goals: to know, to teach, to be just, to seduce, to justify, to evaluate, to rouse emotion, to oversee’ (1988: xii). But conjoining one phrase with another is far from being a smooth process. Dealing with this problem is the task of the type of ‘philosophical politics’ (1988: xiii) the French critic devises. Similarly, literature is invested with the urgent – and, if we linger on the paradox presented by Derrida and Lyotard, ever necessary and ever impossible – role of bearing ‘witness to differends by finding idioms for them’ (1988: 13).

Faced with the complexities of genre, the question of crossbreed types becomes almost secondary. Dissent and discordancy are inherent in the process of establishing standard forms. While seeking to set up a ‘pax’ (1988: 151, original emphasis) and a ‘pact’ (1988: 151) between phrases, the genre underscores the borderline quality of the components of its discourse: ‘[a]n internal peace is bought at the price of perpetual differends on the outskirts’ (151). The phrase itself persists as an area of conflict between types of discourses; the differend can only be temporarily suspended and never suppressed.

Incredibly, a matter so difficult to grasp and codify as genre is has influenced literary production through the ages, in terms of ‘prescriptions and restrictions’ (Dubrow 2014: 9), as well as readers’ reception, since it ‘functions much like a code of behavior established between the author and his reader’ (2014: 2).

While it may be argued that the very notion of genre somehow points to simultaneously a necessity and an impossibility – the necessity to impose limits and the impossibility to do so – according to other critics participating in a given form is a matter of an author’s choice. Heather Dubrow’s (2014: 10) in-depth history of genre aesthetics stems from the idea that a writer may opt for one form or another of the literary text according to their conception of art; or even, the assumption of a formal genre indicates deep ‘respect for the past, or at least for one particular period or school within it’. An author’s awareness of their choices goes so far as to bring forth, through the artistic body, a political statement, be it with a celebratory intent or as a declaration of indebtedness to distinguished literary predecessors. This leads Dubrow (2014: 11) to draw a parallel with Marshall McLuhan’s conception of the medium-message relationship. By the same token adopting a specific, time-honoured genre may mean to assert one’s originality and the significance of one’s individual work within that tradition (Dubrow 2014: 12–13).

Although conducted from a more formal standpoint, Dubrow’s analysis implies recognition of the genre’s deceitful nature. While, on the one hand, it stimulates the writer’s freedom, on the other, it imposes a dual commitment dictating the ‘rules that affect not only how he should write the work but also how we should read it’ (2014: 31). The presence of codified elements helps establish from the start a ‘generic contract’ (2014: 31) that will help mutual understanding between the author and the reader. How such a pact will not simultaneously constitute a constrictive bond remains open to question.

At the crossroads of Derrida and Dubrow, in the introduction to their book on film and television celebrity biopic, Márta Minier and Maddalena Pennacchia point to the impossibility to dispense with genre if we want to understand creative production in any field. The notion encompasses at once a sort of uniformity in content and form connected with ‘the transmission of common attributes’ (Minier and Pennacchia 2014: 4), and a tendency to ‘miscegenation’ (2014: 4), that is, continuous deviations from that norm. Studies of genre must come to terms with its constant oscillating between ‘familiarity and strangeness, identity and difference’ (2014: 4). Hybrid forms seem to have inherited such an imperfect – but extremely fecund – state. Stemming from the same consideration of the complexities of delimiting genre-related issues, Minier’s (2014: 83) study of television celebiographies indicates docudrama’s ‘Janus-faced’ character due to its ‘double, if not multiple, generic lineage’: historical accuracy and creative manipulation. Moving beyond conceptual matters the critic provides a practicable definition based on an observation of its two constituents: ‘whilst based on historical documents to a great extent it also uses (semi-) fictitious dialogues and some other fictitious elements that are still supposed to be within the realm of the credible’ (Minier 2014: 83). The structure envisages the intertwining of ‘archival footage, imagined dialogue and actual talking-head interviews’ (2014: 83).

I will resume the discussion on defining docudrama from the point of view of its form in paragraph in section ‘Destructuring the narrative: The complex hearing of documentary’ in Chapter 1. The premises to an exploration of audio docufiction need to include some remarks on the connection between genre constraints and the creative potentialities of the medium. Instead of considering it a hindrance to scholarly analysis, the idea that genre is in itself deceptive and therefore bound to elude our attempts at any logical framing can become a resource. Vittorio Iervese goes as far as to consider this the founding characteristic of film documentary. All contemporary art expressions at large contain a measure of ‘unpredictability’: the capacity of ‘making visible an otherwise invisible order, simultaneously making probable what is otherwise improbable, that is, a possible order of the world’ (Iervese 2013: 37, translation added). As a typical trait of film documentary’s representation of reality through creative strategies, ‘unpredictability’ is to be understood ‘precisely in terms of an expansion of the horizons of the possible’ (2013: 37, translation added). The notion concerns an aesthetic evaluation of films that make use of a heterogeneity of techniques and materials in a mixture of standard and unorthodox approaches, but it also encompasses the possibility of constructing knowledge that is alternative to ‘institutional and mainstream discourses on the world’ (2013: 38, translation added, original emphasis). A work’s unpredictability is its capacity to ‘open up breaches into reality, in order to let doubt emerge from it and feed into it an urge for knowledge and participation’ (2013: 38, translation added). It is this process of continuously shifting from sight and simultaneously opening up unexpected horizons that conceivably makes the form documentary difficult to pinpoint and circumscribe. The sociologist observes that unpredictability ‘primarily concerns the impossibility to classify this group of films into a unique and recognizable genre, with unique prerogatives and stylistic features’ (2013: 37, translation added).

The notion of unpredictability presents intriguing implications for a study of radio forms, sound itself being the most erratic and volatile of media. Paraphrasing Iervese’s (2013:37) words, where standardized, reproducible procedures in radio-making fail to provide a precise categorization of art documentary, (possible) definitions of a genre stem from a number of questions and from an analysis of the methodological approaches adopted, all having unpredictability as a distinctive trait. It will then be necessary to observe by what techniques and procedures sound is shaped into the chosen form, what materials are being processed and from what domain they are drawn – in short, what type of ‘reality’ is being talked about. The primary question to tackle concerns the ‘matter’. If genre is inherently impure and docudrama doubly so, what difference does it make that the form is expressed in sound? Arguably, it is radio docufiction’s very nature as a crossbreed genre intersecting documentary and dramatic aspects through sound manipulation that confers it a marked trait of unpredictability and the power of opening up alternative understandings of reality.

The sound matter discovered

The role and function of the audio dimension in expressing and representing is the second standpoint to be taken into consideration. The relevance of sound requires in-depth exploration because it pertains to the very specificity of the medium. This question has often complicated discussions on radio genres. Back in the 1980s, Martin Esslin (1987: 30, note 3) implicitly recognized the difficulty when he decided to exclude radio in his book considering drama in film, theatre and television within a common semiotic frame of reference:

I have put radio in brackets because, although radio drama is also undoubtedly drama, it has some paradoxical and complex features. […] While many of the visual aspects of drama are also present in radio, its inclusion in the discussion of the many visual aspect of drama on stage and screen might unduly complicate matters.

Nevertheless, Britain presents a notable tradition in the study of the audio dimension which is rooted in the first attempts, back in the 1920s–30s, to redeem the radio play from its, more distinguished, theatre equivalent. Practitioners upheld the primacy of sound in expressing reality beyond all visual imagery and physical objectification of the stage (Lea 1926) and in creating, through ‘the voice colours’ (Guthrie 1929: 178), the entire atmosphere of the radio play. The images that are thus produced in the listener’s mind are ‘less substantial but more real than the cardboard grottoes, the calico rosebuds, the dusty grandeur of the stage’ (Guthrie 1931: 8). Attempts were made to establish practical ‘rules’ pivoting around notions of sound’s essentiality, signification and self-containment (see in particular Lance Sieveking’s pioneering work The Stuff of Radio [1934]). Commenting on Tyrone Guthrie’s The Squirrel’s Cage (1929), Donald McWhinnie (1959: 102) will emphasize the results of great equilibrium and compactness that a dramatic construction based on an aural framework in which words and music become elements of an overall orchestration brings about:

each moment is calculated in relation to another moment; a total edifice in which words on the page and words in the mind, sound and silence on the page, in the mind, in the ear, work together and against each other.

The discussion gradually shifts from the ‘limits’ of radio to its artistic potentialities. The stumbling block constituted by exclusive reliance on one of the senses – and the least trustworthy at that – is overturned into an advantage. A medium-specific aesthetics, independent of the theatre, starts to develop. Authors now address a public that listens. Ian Rodgers (1982: 25) effectively calls this trend ‘writing to be heard’. Practitioners, artists and critics at the BBC focus on radio’s expressive power. Louis MacNeice (1947: 12) is one of the first to recognize that ‘sound alone is for most people more potent, more pregnant, more subtle, than pictures alone and for that reason – regardless of the material pros and cons of television – I hope that sound broadcasting will survive, dispensing with people’s faces’. A view of radio’s limits as an asset descends from a consideration of the radio play (and the sound text in general) as a balanced and coherent ‘whole’. According to McWhinnie (1959: 168), the dramatic movement unfolding within the audio dimension in The Dark Tower (1946) is not simply a form of, to adopt today’s fashionable term, storytelling, but it is a manner of ‘generating atmosphere, music, colour, perpetually stimulating the inner vision, guiding the listener (as a composer does) through an infinitely variable world of sound’.

MacNeice’s radio works are notable in another respect. In a different way from novelists’ tales of individuals, they showcase the movements and contradictions of moral principles (Holme in Drakakis 1981: 69), with a type of symbolism, through allegory, and of didacticism which places them at the crossroads of morality plays³ and Epic Theatre. Both his conception of the sound composition as a self-contained and distinctive universe and his usage of the aural medium for the expression of ideas, beyond emotions and mental images, prefigure the approach to the audio matter of many contemporary radio productions.

In the 1950s, sound is placed at the centre of all research interested in artistic programmes and is exploited in its capacity to both stir emotions and signify concepts. We owe to McWhinnie the codification of the principles of radio dramatic art in this period. As John Drakakis (1981: 27) observes, McWhinnie’s notable book The Art of Radio (1959) centres on the types of reality which are represented through sound and the ‘styles of presentation’ that the pure audio dimension allows for. McWhinnie (1959: 93) envisages a radio work as ‘an artistic unity’ in which the various elements, patterns, concepts and emotions are perfectly balanced and smoothly blended, a coherent and organic structure capable of unfolding radio’s potentiality to communicate the author’s truth in an effective way. While, in order to achieve this, it is almost impossible to dictate and follow precise, codified, rules, one guiding principle remains paramount: ‘There is one simple and vital fact governing radio form, which I have already indicated: the radio act comes out of silence, vibrates in the void and in the mind, and returns to silence, like music’ (McWhinnie 1959: 93). Among the raw materials utilized by the radio playwright, besides words and all types of sounds (effects, natural sounds, music, musique concrète), silence becomes for the first time the object of systematic study as a dramatic element of invaluable efficacy. It is an imaginative stimulus that, when properly employed, may be more expressive than words, since ‘during silence, things happen invisibly in the minds of the players and in our imagination’ (1959: 89). Silence is usually perceived as one of the many ‘ingredients’ of the audio text. Still in 1971, Esslin (1971: 9) writes of the radio play as a ‘continuum of sound’ and of silence as ‘a sudden gap’ in an accurately structured and tightly woven pattern of voices, effects and music. Compelling as it may be both emotionally and conceptually, it marks an interruption in a resounding world. On the contrary, for McWhinnie (1959: 89, original emphasis) silence is where everything begins. In the dumb moments, the one who listens is plunged into a world

in which there is another level of existence apart from what is merely said. In fact silence adds a dimension; sound comes from it, sound returns to it, words have their being surrounded by it, it is the cloth on which the pattern is woven.

This will become a key topic in the following research and practice of radio art and particularly, as we shall see, in the contemporary scenario.

McWhinnie’s awareness that it is impossible to encapsulate the audio text within formal constraints brings us back to the notion of genre. He talks about a ‘tension’ inherent in radio productions, as in any work of art, which drives it dynamically throughout its unfolding in the listener’s ear: ‘How to say what you want to say within the limitations of your medium, and how to modify or intensify the possibilities of your medium to accommodate what you have to say’ (McWhinnie 1959: 99). In more recent years, in an essay on radio documentary, David Hendy will employ the idea of ‘tension’ in a similar way. Whereas McWhinnie moved from an ‘existential’ (Crook 2021: 29) consideration of the radio play, Hendy (2009: 226) takes a more pragmatical standpoint: ‘the tensions in the relationship between the primary material of raw actuality and the discursive practices – narration, montage, editing – that go into creating a secondary creative interpretation of that material in order to generate wider meanings’ are virtually irresolvable precisely because they are ‘inherent in the form’. Attempts to describe docudrama as a genre have to come to terms with these often conflicting intrinsic forces and proceed through approximation. In this respect, the concept of continuum, variously exploited by scholars to classify creative sub-genres on radio (e.g. McHugh 2012: 40; Starkey 2004: 212), can be used to visualize the resultant of the intersection of sound materials and procedures and to at least partly account for the sense of indeterminacy that seems inherent in docudrama, and even more so in radio docudrama. In between the two extremes – documentary and drama – lies that uninterrupted, blurred area along which to situate individual productions according to the degree of interference between actuality and imaginary account they present. Individual broadcasts can be observed in their movement of constant approximation to one end or the other, while virtually no production can be said to be sitting at the drama or the documentary extreme with firmly established features.

The inheritors of the faith in sound

In contemporary studies observations on sound’s nature often intertwine with research on radio genres, with a focus on the conceptual and technical traits that subsume a production under the heading either of drama or of documentary. At the same time, analyses are mainly concerned with the (mostly scripted) verbal content. There is a tendency to view sound (i.e. music and noises) as an extra element having the function of emphasizing the value of words and contributing as a complement to the overall meaning within a mainly ‘spoken’ context. At the basis of his examination of radio drama Andrew Crisell (1994: 53) places the assumption that the primary code of radio is verbal; the other components of the sound text ‘draw not only their meaning but in some cases their very identity from the words around them’ due to precisely their elusive nature – or sometimes their self-containment, like in the case of music – that borders on unaccountability. The pre-eminence the critic grants to linguistic contextualization as the leading conveyor of sense probably explains why he turns to the classical notion of imagination as a way for the listener to fill in the gaps left by a somewhat ‘incomplete’ medium: ‘However often we hear [the dramatis personae], and in however much detail they are described, we will be required to picture them in our own way, together with further details of them which are not described’ (1994: 153, original emphasis). The argument seems to leave in the background the intricate question of the conceptualization and construction of meaning arising from the folds of the audio texture, beyond the descriptive or depicting effort on the listener’s part. This is taken one step further by Tim Crook. In his consideration of the aural/oral component of all forms of representation, including film and the theatre, from the point of view of both philosophy and practice, the critic touches upon the question of the specificity of the sound matter when he asserts the necessity to identify ‘the sound signs used to construct these representations [of reality] – that is, words, sounds, music and silence’ (Crook 2011: 30). He acknowledges ‘the polysemic properties of radio drama and indeed most sound texts’ (2011: 25) and indicates ‘[t]he variety and imaginary vividness of mental perception’ (2011: 25) inherent in the listening experience as a means to evaluate ‘soundplay across the ambiguous boundary of news, documentary and drama’ (2011: 25). Interestingly, it is in his book on radio drama that he tackles the question of the boundaries between forms in connection with – and almost as a consequence of – sound’s specificity. Questioning the presumed hierarchy of senses that grants full primacy to sight in building coherent mental content, the critic considers ‘the crafting of sound in its pure sense’ (Crook 1999b: 53), that is, ‘the sound of words and music as much as pure sound effects’ (1999b: 53). Arguably, recorded material or actualities⁴ in themselves are likely to be perceived as fictional by ‘the mind’s eye or imagination’ (1999b: 60) if they are not introduced or accompanied by ‘accurate signposting’ (1999b: 60). This may be constituted by ‘visual familiarity or identification’ (1999b: 54), communication based on words, or a title. In sum, the sound in itself does not work as an indicator of the difference between fact and fiction for the listener; it is only through ‘interaction with memory, other media and contextualization’ (1999b: 60) that an audio work is understood as drama or documentary.

If sound in itself does not mark the difference between genres, it is important to understand what it actually does to the narrative regardless of how a programme has been labelled. This means to consider sound as a signifying element per se and consequently analyse all aural components – words, noises, effects, music and silence, as well as the features of utterances, e.g. volume, cadence and rhythm – in their reciprocal relationship not hierarchically predetermined. With regard to this, it is worth making reference to the findings of a few scholars. Guy Starkey (2004: 178) discusses radio drama as an attempt like many others to portray real-life situations ‘that actively involves representatives of the people and events concerned’. If drama in any medium is always an interpretation, sometimes even a distortion, of life’s events, all stages in the making of radio drama are interpretative acts on the part of those involved: the writer, the producer and the end-user alike. What complicates matters further has to do with the specificity of the medium. Each one of ‘the raw materials used to encode meaning’ (Starkey 2004: 204), that is, voice, sound and silence, is