Apr 5, 2013 |
Other than the 20 Things ebook, one of the things I’ve been involved with over my career that seems to have resonated most with people was a radio drama series called Claybourne. It was something I helped produce in the late 90s with Belinda Todd, Jim McLarty, William Davis and a handful of really lovely actors and musicians.
To be honest, we didn’t really know what we were doing. To a large extent, we were making it up as we went along. We really just wanted to make a radio series that we would enjoy. And so there were things about it that are probably unique to that series. It was funny, romantic, genuinely scary in places, convoluted, full of great characters and it has perhaps the most ambitious sonic design of any radio programme I’ve come across. We were going for ‘cinematic realism’, if that’s even a thing.
Listen here.
Now, 15 years since it first went to air, a group of German fans are making their own version. In German.
Given that the core of the story is centred around an American who finds himself a fish out of water in a small town in New Zealand where bad things are happening, translating it into German must be an incredibly complex affair. Especially since whole chunks of dialogue were in Maori.
I wrote a short piece on the Claybourne Hoerspiel website:
It’s so great to see Claybourne continue to reach new ears, 15 years on from when we first created it. And to have it translated into German and remade for a whole new audience is such an incredible honour, and so incredibly appropriate – because if nothing else, Claybourne is about what happens when one culture encounters another.
Claybourne is one of the things I have been most proud to be part of in my life. The fact that other people like it too makes it even better. I’m so excited to see this project come to fruition. It’s a real tribute to the universality of those stories where love, greed, power, misunderstanding, legend, prophecy, good coffee, whales, psychotic computers, and subterranean monsters all play an important part.
Jan 4, 2011 |
I’ve spent the last week or so in New Zealand. I’m doing the opening keynote speech at the International radio conference being held at AUT from the 11th of January, and I’ve come over a bit early so I could spend Christmas and New Year in the summer sun with my parents, sisters and extended family.
I’m reluctant to blog about it here too much – partly because I’ve been doing so many different things every day and I’d have to spend the rest of my time just writing posts about what I’ve been up to already, but mostly because I’ve already been uploading photos to Flickr and videos to Vimeo, updating statuses (stati?) on Twitter and Facebook, and doing a bit of a running commentary on my Dubber’s Not Here Right Now travel blog.
A lot has happened, and as you might expect, much of it has been outside.
But there’s something I haven’t been talking about in any of those other online places, and that’s actually the main project I’ve been immersing myself in during the bits and pieces of downtime I’ve had while here: the personal archive.
(more…)
May 22, 2009 |
Years ago, I put a couple of radio shows I had produced back when I was a radio producer up on the internet. One of them, Ashley’s Worlds, was a kids’ ‘cartoon for radio’, in which all the characters were cats. The other, Claybourne was a sort of sci-fi-soap-opera-thriller-adventure in which – well, lots of weird stuff happens. Monsters and what-not.
One of the people who downloaded them was an American schoolgirl who became their biggest fan. She got in touch and told me how much she loved the stories (and how much she loved animals) – and, so of course, I replied.
Over the past five or six years, I’ve had the odd email from Beth, letting me know how she’s getting on and what she’s up to. And today I received this wonderful email from her father, Nick:
My daughter Beth has loved your stories since she was little…so much so she has written you several times. She is the American from South Carolina that loves animals and you recommended she read “All Creatures Great and Small”. Anyway I just came across your blog again and wanted to let you know how thankful I am that you encouraged her to read that book. She is making great strides in the field of zoo keeping and now is an assistant keeper at Riverbanks Zoo in South Carolina.Thanks for being a good mentor. Our world is so large and yet so connected.
This makes me happy. As I said to Nick in my reply to him – when you look at the internet, at first it just seems like technology. And then you start using it and you begin to notice that it’s just people talking to each other.
