Output details

The Unfortunates

This practice-research dramatisation of BS Johnson’s 1969 novel pursued two key research questions:

1) How might an experimental dramaturgy foreground the performance of self in the processes of memory recall – issues explored both in the book’s innovative structure and in my own academic research?

2) How might the novel’s formal experiment find an equivalence in audio drama on a mainstream broadcast network (BBC Radio 3)?

Published in a box in 27 chapters, intended, apart from first and last, to be read in any order, the novel follows a sports writer’s memories of time spent in a Northern city with a now dead friend, prompted by a day spent back in that city to report on a football match. Its conceit is that the reader’s randomised encounter with the written text replicates the experience of memory’s relatively unstructured and fragmentary processes.

To create a parallel interactive experience of memory’s ‘random’ structure for the audience, the dramatisation was available in two forms; as a ‘conventional’ but randomised linear broadcast (the 18 individual sections shuffled prior to transmission); and as individual sections available on a ‘carousel’ on the BBC Website which listeners could shuffle as they chose, restructuring the relationship between narrative sequencing and the audio drama’s affective structures.

The adaptation addressed the first research question by exploring the affective impact of the protagonist’s experience of the process of remembering his ‘dear, dead friend’ and playing that remembered past against the present-day of the narrative. It addressed the second through foregrounding the possibilities of alternative, non-linear and interactive forms of audio drama in the contemporary structures of broadcast media.

I originated the script, the online concept, randomising method and photographs accompanying the online version as part of an ongoing body of research on memory and the performance of the self.