Appreciated. We haven’t had any problems, but it’s all speech.
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It seems that they had an issue & bedded quickly into the concept of monologues. Not inherently bad, Talking Heads shows that, but it needs really excellent writing and actors who can handle it.
We have NO excellent writers & few enough actors who could deal with it.
Then, a bit of technical imagination, surely to God they have the equipment & technicians with the expertise.
Again, they fall down.
When presented with a problem, overcome it. You’ll be forgiven for trips & spills.
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I’m now stuck, I didn’t enjoy day one of monologues, but if they’re going to try to persist any storylines then I’m going to need to listen… I would honestly prefer a six week gap and back to normal. I was excited for the return, but now feel very let down by what has been delivered- and that is no fault of the actors, I know they are doing their best- loved the “at home” clips so far!
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Never have 12.5 minutes seemed so long.
The prod team are between a rock and a hard place wrt any ‘return to normal’ but these monologues might well kill TA off. I am not sure that would be a bad thing. Much more of the inside of David’s head and I will be out axe-murdering again. And the nice parole board did ask me not to.
Tracy being axe-murdered by Plank would be good, though < wistful sigh >
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Listened to the first couple when driving. Not great, but didn’t register too much about the acting. Catching up with the rest today, though…
Tim Bentinck has a lot of experience - I’ve heard him in quite a few non-BBC audio dramas and on the whole he’s been good. I’ve generally put him down as doing his best with a pretty dull character. Tonight however, it sounded like they’d replaced him with a screen reader; phrasing and inflexion were all over the place.
And this is the man who kissed SOC’s arse over the purge of non-drama-school actors…
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I have just realised that I haven’t listened for about a month…
Carinthia.xx
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If anyone else listens to no such thing as a fish, they have continued recording, also a BBC radio show - and it is just as good as always. I don’t understand the difference for The Archers, is it because we would “miss” all the background noises?! I know I wouldn’t!
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The background noises are just mixed in during editing anyway.
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Very intrusively, last night. Some brilliantly naturalistic acting constantly interrupted by over-loud SFX of some snotty gobshite wittering on about wanting to be a “rural entrepreneur”.
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I might reverse the order of a couple of words…
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Have they got any better? I am tempted to wait til the end of monologues to resume listening!
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The quality of recording remains excellent (quite good enough for use as outlined in the first post of this thread); the quality of acting, as you’d expect, varies with the actor; the quality of script is not as adequate as one might hope for.
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Marginally worse than I feared, in most cases. And I am not known for my optimism.
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And that, laydeees and gentlemen, concludes our series on the subject of “The Art of Masterly Understatement” 
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It was a Litotes!
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Just discovered Staged.
If they can manage to record video remotely, surely radio shouldn’t be beyond them?
Nothing wrong with monologues per se, of course, but to be effective, the writer has to properly understand the characters. That it doesn’t work for TA is rather telling.
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Well, Keri Davies’ week was the worst, and he has been writing the characters for over thirty years so he ought to understand what makes them tick by now! Maybe all the worst bits of it were written by his companion in crime Adrian Flynn, who has only been a scriptie on TA since 1998…
The second week was Nick Warburton & Sarah McDonald-Hughes (both quite new), week three was Tim Stimpson & Daniel Thurman (bad at the job, and new), this week is Naylah Ahmed & Caroline Harrington (since 2017 and since time immemorial respectively; one day I shall bother to find out when CH actually started, but it was some time between 1988 and 1998).
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At the moment I have a list which is woefully incomplete, but eventually I shall get more out of the Genome, as I complete fetching the cast-lists from there (up to 1979 at present):
Scriptwriters:
Mary Cutler (May 1979) - “On 28 May 2019 I attended my last script meeting as an Archers writer, forty years and three weeks after I submitted my first set of scripts.”
Joanna Toye (1980)
Simon Frith (1983)
Graham Harvey (1984)
Keri Davies (1992)
Caroline Harrington’s exact arrival remains a mystery; all I can be sure of is that she has been with TA since before 1998 (and after 1988; born 1967)
Adrian Flynn (August 1998)
Nawal Gadalla (May 2000)
Tim Stimpson (June 2003)
Carolyn Sally Jones (May 2011)
Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti (June 2012)
Paul Brodrick: rejoined (first episode on 12/2014)
Charlotte Delaney: one week only (9-14/8/2015)
Gillian Richmond (first episode on 6/9/2015)
Liz John: (first episode on 2/4/2017)
Sue Teddern: (first episode on 9/7/2017)
Naylah Ahmed: (first episode on 13/8/2017; was a director before that)
Amanda Whittington: (first episode on 1/7/2018)
Sarah McDonald Hughes: (first episode on 9/12/2018)
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