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Tuned In

A radio drama project with young people

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Tuned In is a bespoke participatory project funded by Birmingham City Council’s Creative Futures. If you are interested in similar work, please contact us.

Introduction

Tuned In is an exciting new radio drama project, made possible with funding from Birmingham City Council’s Creative Futures. Women & Theatre are working with young people from two schools in Birmingham – a group of year 9 students from St Alban’s Academy (in Highgate) and the whole of Priestley Smith School for the visually impaired (in Perry Barr).

Each school will create, from scratch, three original short radio plays, with the guidance of experienced writer Steph Dale, radio director Jenny Stephens and W&T’s associate director Terina Talbot. With the help of these professionals, the young people are creating work very much in their own words, and inspired by their own ideas. Once written, the plays will be ‘swapped over’ to the other school, to be rehearsed and performed. The six plays will be recorded at the BBC studios in Birmingham with the help of professional directors, editors and sound engineers.

Tuned In will culminate in a celebratory event which will include a recorded performance of each of the plays. The hope is that these plays will be broadcast to a wider listening audience – but at the very least each student will have a copy of the recordings to keep.

Scripting is currently taking place and we’re looking forward to the next step, so watch this space … and stay ‘tuned in’ for more!!

History

Birmingham City Council’s Creative Futures funding stream supports artistic projects which are inspired and led by young people themselves. Tuned In is an inclusive project which encourages young people to recognise new outlets for their creativity: the imaginative potential of radio and the power of sound and the spoken word.

An important part of the project is to give the participants the opportunity to meet and work together. To kick-start the project we held an ‘Inspiration Day’ which brought together students, staff and artists to listen to extracts of radio drama, meet a ‘real life’ radio actor who regularly appears on ‘The Archers’ (and is himself visually impaired), discuss the medium and simply ‘to listen’ to the sounds of the world around us.

By far, the most important and memorable aspect of the whole day for the young people was meeting one another. Some of them had been quite apprehensive about the day, had simply not been around anyone with a visual impairment and weren’t sure what to expect. Others expected confident, noisy people from a much larger school and were a bit worried about that. Perceptions and concerns had, however, most definitely shifted by the end of the day and simple friendship took over.

Notes

The joy and surprise of meeting new people and ‘touching other worlds’ is one of the most rewarding aspects of this project. Young people are meeting other young people whose life experience is different from their own and discovering they have a lot in common. We all become better ‘tuned in’, in all sorts of ways and on all sorts of levels as a result.
Terina Talbot, Associate Director, Women & Theatre

Outcome

‘At first I thought that it would be hard to work with someone less able than me but I saw how confident they were and that made me confident as well.’
Yosuf Mahamed, St Albans School

Production Credits

Artistic Lead: Terina Talbot
Writer: Steph Dale
Director: Jenny Stevens
Sound Director: Louise Wilcox

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