If you haven’t been following us on Facebook, or even if you have, I’m delighted to share that the Little Wonder Radio Plays (almost) complete collection is now live and free to stream: 10–20-minute full cast audio dramas with award winning writers, professionally trained actors, and no adverts or paywalls. Just quality drama, for free, because we love making it.
You can stream all the plays below or visit our Little Wonder Radio Plays pages for more information. The rest of this article will talk about the Little Wonder relaunch, our first three plays, and links so that you can listen to all our material.
Little Wonder got kicked in the teeth by COVID, like so many other things, and we have no plans to return to our previous two plays a month publishing schedule. We are immensely proud of the 40 plays we published (including the sadly lost Two Slatterns and a King), have one more play lined up almost ready to publish, another two in the process of being edited, and a final play that we will record and publish to wrap things up.
I will be being publishing posts over the next few months that revisit our productions, with a little discussion about how it was made, thoughts on the play and the performance, and a link so you can listen again. You can even download the plays to listen to on your way to work/chilling out in the bath with a glass of wine/on sound-cancelling headphones to block out the screaming of children[i].
Our first three plays: Arranged Marriages, Walking Corpses and Mysterious Voices (Click on the titles to listen to the plays)
A Marriage Has Been Arranged
This play was recorded in my bedroom using whatever I had to hand after I’d read a webpage about recording audio-dramas. I have plenty of theatre experience, but to say I had no real idea what I was doing would be fair. I downloaded Audacity, read the manual, and did my best. I’m amazed it came out so well. I think my favourite thing about this play is that it is proof that anyone can get into making decent quality audio-drama if they want to give it a bash. Be encouraged. The main thing you need is desire.
This is a fun little play, a tremendously progressive piece for its period, and a reminder that once-upon-a-time marriages were arranged over dinner and settled after supper. I mean, I’m not endorsing it, but it’s got to be better than Tinder, right?[ii] It was also my first of many long, painful experiences trying to record effective and interesting footsteps (just wait until we get to Toby Frost’s SFX-engineer’s nightmare inducing ‘Walking the Halls.’)
The Witch of Coos
This was the first of many collaborations with the immensely talented and generous Stephanie Campion. The truth is, however, that the main purpose of this play was to test out the new Zoom X5 recorder I had splashed my cash on and see if the two-way mike[iii] would work well enough for dialogues (further experiments were tried using just one mike[iv] to record a whole group, which were surprisingly good but horrific for editing).
The good news is that the two-way mike did a great job of capturing Stef’s enthralling performance as the mother in Robert Frost’s masterwork, so if you’ve yet to encounter the work of one of America’s greatest ever poets than I have to say this is a good place to start.
Voices
This was my first time going all out – new mikes and mike stands bought from Woodbrass, another enormous talent roped into my insane project (Megan Adele-Lopez, who is now well on her way to making her name as a film director), sounds effects more complex than people walking, and, well, unfortunately, a script that I honestly think is a bit rubbish.
At that point I was still keen to use out-of-copyright shorts I could find on the internet, as I didn’t want to practise on somebody’s new, original work. Voices is a tremendously naïve piece about the horrors of the great war – with an added chunk of how if women ran the world this sort of thing wouldn’t happen (not necessarily disagreeing). It’s interesting to dig these pieces out, because I think they have a historical and cultural value, but Stef and Meagan did exceptional work squeezing some quality acting out of some ropey dialogue.
I got to have great fun with the sound effects! By this point I was also well into the swing of using Guitar Pro to write music for each play, which was a big part of the fun for us making these plays. Many podcasters worry enormously about finding rights free music. The fact that Chris and I spent all these years messing around with guitars turned out to be tremendously useful.
Some final thoughts on the beginning of Little Wonder
Like pretty much everything I’ve ever done in my life, Little Wonder was launched entirely based upon my bravado covering up my total lack of skill or experience. Thankfully, I’ve been fortunate to run into many amazing people over the years; Stephanie Campion and Moving Parts would become an essential part of everything on the performance side of things; Chris, Owen, and Oliver became the crew that made things happen, and helped me become a much better writer, director and producer; the team at the BBC’s Writers Room were generous with their time and support as we attempted outreach to marginalised writers; Little Wonder was made wonderful by the input of some fabulous people, many of whom I haven’t mentioned here can be found on the writers and players pages.
Thank you for taking part. Thank you for listening. If you’d like to keep up with releases, don’t forget to subscribe.
[i] I love being a dad. Honestly. No, honestly, I do. I also love sound-cancelling headphones.
[ii] No. Wrong. Women’s rights are important enough to justify tolerating Tinder (says the married man who met his wife before online dating was a thing). This is just a joke. Don’t shoot me.
[iii] Yes, I’m aware the trend is moving away from “mike” to “mic” as the short form for microphone, but “mic” looks stupid to me, so I intend to resist for as long as possible! Sound engineers, form a queue in the comments to tell me how wrong I am.
[iv] After writing this, I had a conversation with the ineffable Pete Langman, an experienced sound engineer and very funny guy, and I think he may have changed my mind about using “mic” …
[i] I love being a dad. Honestly. No, honestly, I do. I also love sound-cancelling headphones.
[ii] No. Wrong. Women’s rights are important enough to justify tolerating Tinder (says the married man who met his wife before online dating was a thing). This is just a joke. Don’t shoot me.
[iii] Yes, I’m aware the trend is moving away from “mike” to “mic” as the short form for microphone, but “mic” looks stupid to me, so I intend to resist for as long as possible! Sound engineers, form a queue in the comments to tell me how wrong I am.
[iv] After writing this, I had a conversation with the ineffable Pete Langman, an experienced sound engineer and very funny guy, and I think he may have changed my mind about using “mic” …
