Lavender Ink, my first radio drama
We did it! Rosalind Fairclough (who you may know as poet Rosalind York) and I read our way through half an hour of the drama we'd written, live on the radio, and lived to tell the tale. We were fortunate to have technical assistance from Chapel FM's Elliot who was thrilled with our comprehensive cue sheet, and in return did a sterling job of dropping in sound effects and music. You can listen to Lavender Ink here, but you might want to read a bit more about it, first.
Having started out saying we were writing a Victorian melodrama, we ended up with an early 1960s drama with events during the second world war referred back to. Previously when Roz and I did reading and discussion programmes with Andrea Hardaker for Writing on Air, we were encouraged to include music to break up the programme, so I always had a musical element in mind. Once I thought about the practical side of two people in a small studio reading for half an hour, I knew we needed to give ourselves the odd rest when the microphones were off. It was most welcome, on the day.
The two eras of the play lent themselves to two different musical styles and we each picked three tracks we thought were appropriate. My character Pat, a less than enthusiastic bride on her wedding day c.1961, I imagined as having a portable record player and liking rock & roll. Roz's character Marjorie, the bride's mother, had been dancing during the war to vibrant (and quite rude) songs popular in the late thirties. She chose Bo Carter, Lil Johnson and Bessie Smith.
I initially wanted to stick to English rock & roll, Billy Fury for preference, though I was briefly worried that Pat might be an Adam Faith fan. My dad (a teenager himself in the early sixties) suggested Marty Wilde, so the intro is Billy Fury (Gonna Type a Letter) and the first interlude Marty Wilde (Bad Boy). When Roz and I spent five hours in the pub rewriting the script, the music they were playing was about the right era for Pat, and Shakin All Over by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates stuck in my head for the rest of the evening, to the extent that I decided it had to be one of the tracks in the play despite not being English. It became Pat's 'one more song' before she puts the dress on.
We set the play in the West Riding of Yorkshire, though we never explicitly say where (nearby places are mentioned). That means Pat was written for, and read in, more or less my natural voice, though I tried not to sound too deep for a girl in her late teens.
If you're a fan of late fifties/early sixties kitchen sink drama then Lavender Ink might be right up your street. If you like my Little Book of Northern Women, you'll love it. If you want to hear me (39 and gruff) attempt to portray an innocent teenage bride, what are you waiting for? Sister Number One (notoriously hard to impress) has pronounced it 'very good'.
Lavender Ink by Jacqueline Saville and Rosalind Fairclough - you heard us here first.