An academic working in the UK was in touch several years back because she was planning to include an analysis of a sci-fi / thriller / soap opera radio series I made in the late 90s in her PhD. She was focusing on developments in radio drama over time, and was particularly interested in the dramatic representations of indigenous cultures in different places. Our series, being based in New Zealand, had a particular interest in representing Māori culture, language and voices in the context of a very (at the time) contemporary story.

She contacted me today to let me know that she had gone on to publish a book about radio drama more broadly, particularly in the context of our present age of ubiquitous podcast audio narratives.

Despite the age of the series (well over 20 years old), her book kindly gives Claybourne a very generous amount of space in a chapter that’s largely about the groundbreaking podcast ‘Serial’.

She also quotes my writing liberally throughout the book, which is a forgotten pleasure from my professional academic days.

Here’s the relevant section.

Claybourne

The evidence suggests that, as Serial did not emerge out of a vacuum, there is an ‘almost inevitability to the structure and format’ of Serial and the post-Serial (Hancock and McMurtry 2018: 85). I would argue that this ‘almost inevitability’ is maninfest in pre-digital radio drams like Claybourne, indeed down to this very notion of the prominence of seriality. I highlight Claybourne here because of its notions of accessibility and seeking out listeners who might not usually be reached by radio drama. Claybourne ran for 96 episodes on New Zealand radio station Newstalk ZB in 1998. Written by and starring Jim McLarty and William Davis and produced by Andrew Dubber and Belinda Todd, Claybourne was genrecrossing, a sci-fi/thriller soap opera broadcast four days a week in extremely short chunks (around five minutes), a highly addictive format. Set in New Zealand and with many Māori characters and a clear focus on Māori culture, it was, in Dubber’s words ‘deliberately and proudly New Zealand in its language, humour and accent. It was consciously cinematic in production and sound design’ (2006). Furthermore, the serial drama was scheduled just after the 3:00 p.m. news:

we imagined an audience member that would turn the radio on in the car as they waited outside for the school pickup, hear the next instalment, then switch off again (or at least turn the radio down) as the kids got in the car.
(Dubber 2017)

Newstalk ZB was also characterized as having an audience skewed towards ‘white, conservative, middle class, male’ listeners (Dubber 2017)

The listener’s ‘way in’ was Thompson, an American employed by Koestlers, a mysterious corporation. On holiday in New Zealand, Thompson is called to investigate a crisis in Claybourne, a town in the remote part of the north island. Thompson quickly becomes embroiled in the local community interacting with Māori kaumātua (elected tribal leader) Mata. With a televisual emphasis on ‘storyarcs within story arcs’ (Dubber 2006), Claybourne was almost literally too large for its palette, ending after one season when two had been planned. It was resurrected in 2006 as a podcast by the Podcast Network, became one of the most popular spoken word programmes in the history of mp3.com (Hopkinson 2007) and subsequently became available on Bandcamp and Archive.org.

Claybourne had many of the elements that made Serial irresistable:

• The strong pull of seriality and episodes available in digestible chunks
• A seemingly infinite series of cliffhangers
• Centripetal storytelling
• Bookending litany
• Compelling characters
• Accessibility.

Although set in what some listeners might consider an alien culture, it was presented in an accessible way (i.e. Thompson was initiated into Māori traditions and exposed to pervasive elements of Kiwi culture like Vegemite). Dubber describes this as:

The relationship between Mata and Thompson meant that audiences were generally situated somewhere in between. The idea was that any pakeha [white person] who lives in New Zealand is less ignorant of Māori culture than Thompson. As a kaumātua, very few Māori know as much about the culture as Mata.
(Dubber 2017)

The major difference between Serial and Claybourne was in the way the story was told. Claybourne used an omniscient voice. Serial had the noughties idea of the probing, self-reflexive reporter, a sort of true crime/Gothic protagonist. Another important difference was the way in which Claybourne was distributed: by traditional means, on terrestrial radio. In subsequent years, then, it has taken on an afterlife probably not envisaged by its creators, and it’s a testament to the series’ quality that a drama produced by and for a New Zealand audience could be globally engrossing. One thing that Claybourne had that Serial didn’t was that it (potentially) reached people who aren’t in the white, middle class, affluent, educated demographic. This has ramifications for audio drama reaching audiences whom it has traditionally failed to reach; as we have seen, the audiences for BBC Radio 4 have tended to be white, educated and middle class, which is a similar demographic to those who listen to public radio in the United States.

Excerpt from:
Revolution in the Echo Chamber: Audio Drama’s Past, Present and Future by Leslie Grace McMurtry, Intellect Books, 2019 | GBP 79.00 | 295 pages