Radio dramas anyone?

Have you heard of this thing called the radio drama? Up until I became a CreComm student I had never heard a radio drama. I didn’t even know they still existed after being usurped by TV. But apparently they do, and since we’re devoting a good chunk of creative writing class time to the creation of one people must still care. But who listens to these things? I haven’t heard of anyone in their 20s ever say anything about them, or for that matter their 30s, 40s, or 50s. But maybe it’s because I never asked.

Having never heard a radio drama, oh I don’t know, before last week, I’m surprised we learn about it at school because I don’t feel it’s something people in my generation, I’m almost 25 by the way, can connect with. Most of us don’t listen to the radio and when we do it’s in the car flipping through stations desperately looking for one that isn’t in the middle of a 15-minute commercial break. But I think radio dramas might have gotten too quick a shove out the door.

I think a radio drama would be a lot like reading a book, but some one else is the one that’s doing all the work. The medium of radio is a visual one, and dramas create those visual through voices and sound FXs. In the 21^st century we have what I think is a new version of the radio drama, we have audio books that re-create the characters in the story and the feel of the story. But I don’t think enough people take advantage of these audio books, because like the decline of radio people are more interested in seeing the visual instead of imagining it for themselves, and with the internet quickly becoming the centre of how most people communicate and watch TV the auditory mediums are something, I fear, that will be lost from our society.