All this week Torchwood is being stripped across BBC1 at 9pm, which may or may not be a good thing. And last week, Radio 4 ran three new 45 minute “Afternoon Plays” of Torchwood (following a one-off episode last autumn surrounding Big Bang Day).
What’s really interesting is that the BBC has made all three episodes available to download as mp3s for 7 days only (therefore at time of writing, there are only two available to download).
That’s obviously a sensible thing to do – the Torchwood audience probably isn’t a devoted Radio 4 Afternoon Play listener, and the announcements at the end of Monday and Tuesday’s episodes probably mean that more people listened than would otherwise have. But it’s a fascinating development in what BBC Radio allows to be downloaded.
I’m pretty sure that lots of people would like more radio drama to be available for downloading – if not free, then via outlets like iTunes. But aside from a few high-profile releases like the current George Smiley season, only sure-fire hits get the BBC Audio CD releases. They tend to be comedies or plays that are based on already popular book series.
The average Radio 4 Afternoon Play doesn’t fall into either of these categories, and so, unless it does well and perhaps picks up an award somewhere down the line, very few get repeats. The tapes just gather dust in an archive somewhere (or more likely, the files sit on a fileserver somewhere).
There are obviously difficulties in doing this. Most dramas and sitcoms have incidental music – indeed sometimes it can be core to the programmes. Then there are the various rights issues with actors and writers to be considered. But the Torchwood dramas have shown that these can be overcome if the desire’s there.
It’s all the more surprising that Torchwood was used to try this out because it’s a solidly commercial brand. All three of last week’s plays are getting CD releases, and will no doubt also be available via the various (legitimate) download sites.
The BBC has made sure that the plays are only offered in 64k mono formats, meaning that if you want to hear the effects to the full you’re going to need to get CD versions, but a lot of people – and kids in particular – will be more than happy with mono.
When the BBC Trust concluded its Public Value Test into the iPlayer and approved it, it also brought the BBC’s then trial podcast service into full operation. But it specifically said that two areas were to be excluded: classical music and book readings.
The classical music record industry claimed that the BBC’s then recent Beethoven Experience downloads, where the BBC had offered full recordings of all nine Beethoven symphonies, had impacted massively on them, meaning that nobody would be interested in buying another recorded Beethoven symphony. (Curiously, Amazon lists dozens of recordings of Beethoven symphonies released in the last couple of years).
The book readings decision was interesting. I believe that book publishers sees Radio 4 as having a very symbiotic relationship with them. If one of their titles is chosen to for the non-fiction Book of the Week slot or the fiction Book At Bedtime slot, they’re normally pretty fast in slapping “As Heard on Radio 4” stickers onto the covers of stock and trying to ensure that stores know where to direct customers when they come in enquiring about something they heard earlier that day (this doesn’t always work, however).
There’s also the small issue that BBC Worldwide is quite a big player in the recorded book industry, having swallowed up Cover to Cover at some time previously, and often releasing unabridged versions of the significantly foreshortened extracts we hear on the radio.
But book readings being stopped from being made available as podcasts doesn’t mean that plays can’t be. So let’s hope that in the future, many more drama (and comedy) productions are made available for download. Allowing their purchase might even see a small profit come in.