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Papers by Leslie McMurtry

Revolution in the Echo Chamber

Gothic Studies

Horror and the Gothic have long been staple genres of radio drama, including the radio drama revi... more Horror and the Gothic have long been staple genres of radio drama, including the radio drama revival series of the late 1970s–early 1980s , CBS Radio Mystery Theater (1974–82). During the same time period, the Canadian government, recognising an emergent national-identity crisis in relation to its southern neighbour, invested heavily in original programming on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). This resulted in the popular horror series Nightfall (1980–3), which Danielle Hancock argues presented ‘murder as a Canadian national narrative’ (2018). While CBSRMT occasionally adapted existing stories from other media, the majority of the output for both series were original, written-for-the-air dramas. Embodying Gothic returns of the past upon the present and the effects of transgressive conduct in society, murder is examined as a Gothic trait in episodes of Nightfall and CBSRMT. Radio’s ambiguities and intimacies provoke listeners of these programmes to confront disjunction. Th...

Footsteps tap behind you, a hot breath whispers into your ear, the tiny hairs on your neck stand ... more Footsteps tap behind you, a hot breath whispers into your ear, the tiny hairs on your neck stand on end: even though it might at first seem an unlikely medium for charting sensory horror, sound storytelling has an inexhaustible capacity for a "raw biological reality" that haunts "a too neatly rationalized world" (Morgan, 2002: 109). This haunting tracks with Ndalianis' analysis of the mediated physicality of horror in Horror Sensorium. According to Ndalianis, horror's "focus on sensory encounters" makes it important to study the genre within its medial proliferation as well as its medial specificity. Different media, after all, incorporate the senses in different ways, and by extension, create sensory horror in different ways as well. In learning about horror and sound mediation in conjunction with each other, the sensory affect of both come into focus. Just as radio, according to Neil Verma, is "always reinventing how listening is done" (2012: 228), podcasting works within the contemporary media environment to shape listening practices. While insightful steps have been made into the analysis of horror podcasts, research into podcasting's mediality is just beginning to develop a critical language appropriate to the study of the medium in its specificity (Berry, 2018: 23). This article contributes to that language by drawing on the horror genre's focus on liminality and sensory experience to better understand both horror and its mediation. It does so by situating a close reading of a radio text, CBC's Nightfall (1980-1983), and a podcast text, The Paragon Collective's Darkest Night (2016 to present), a narrative horror fiction podcast that presents itself as binaural. These series were selected for both their similarities and differences: both are horror anthologies and focus on their sensory effects as one of their main draws. They are different in that Nightfall is a radio series from the early 1980s and Darkest Night is a current podcast. The generic similarities between the series make it easier to learn about their differences in sensory mediation and the extent to which podcasting, following Andrew Bottomley, remediates radio. By studying the series in conjunction with each other, we further hope to shed light on the working of audio in sensory horror in general, even though any claims we make in this area are a tentative step into an under-researched area more than a conclusive statement on all of audio horror. Nightfall was broadcast between 1980-1983 on Canadian radio (though it was also picked up by some US affiliate radio stations). In the late 1970s, CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) radio received government funding to create programing with a clear Canadian identity, which resulted in their late-night drama series, Nightfall. Not only did Nightfall present "murder as a Canadian national narrative" (Hancock, "Canada, oh Canadaaargh!": 1), the horror drama was thematically adult and violent, focusing on bodies in a way that other contemporary North American radio drama avoided. By contrast, Darkest Night is told through a series of vignettes, each of which is focalised through the decapitated head of a recently dead person. The podcast emphasises its approach to spatiality when advertising itself as binaural. Binaural literally means two ears, and the use of some kind of binaural recording and reception technology has been around for quite a long time. As Stephen Paul points out in "Binaural Recording Technology: A Historical Review

Documents and other elements of a practice-based research output. An audio drama created and prod... more Documents and other elements of a practice-based research output. An audio drama created and produced to communicate information about the Badlands National Park.

Before the broadcast of a series of radio plays on BBC’s Radio 4 in September 2011, few people in... more Before the broadcast of a series of radio plays on BBC’s Radio 4 in September 2011, few people in the UK would have heard of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. The ubiquity of the Radio 4 adaptations in 2011 meant that not only did many more people know the book by name at least, but perhaps they were among the millions who downloaded the plays from iTunes. There were many elements to Life and Fate as a production that were unique, including its structure, the role of star casting within its production, its approach to adaptation, and its approach to genre-within-marketing. This paper explores the progression within BBC Radio 4’s drama department in the context of Life and Fate. As BBC radio drama evolves to respond to its audience(s), what kind of audience did it seek to reach with Life and Fate and how successful was it in doing so?

Palgrave Communications, 2017

Routledge eBooks, May 20, 2022

Antes da transmissao de uma serie de pecas radiofonicas na Radio 4 da BBC em setembro de 2011, po... more Antes da transmissao de uma serie de pecas radiofonicas na Radio 4 da BBC em setembro de 2011, poucas pessoas no Reino Unido haviam ouvido falar em Life and Fate , de Vasily Grossman. A ubiquidade das adaptacoes da Radio 4 em 2011 significa que nao somente mais pessoas conhecem o livro pelo menos pelo seu nome, mas talvez estejam entre os milhoes que baixaram as pecas pelo iTunes. Ha muitos elementos de Life and Fate como uma producao que sao unicos, incluindo a estrutura, o envolvimento de um cast de estrelas na producao, a abordagem a adaptacao, e sua abordagem genero-marketing. Este paper explora a progressao do departamento de drama da Radio 4 da BBC no contexto de Life and Fate . Como um drama radiofonico da BBC evolui para responder ao seu publico, que tipo de audiencia procura alcancar com Life and Fate e quao bem sucedido foi em faze-lo?

Many genres and media create a blurring line between reality and fiction. Radio serials and in pa... more Many genres and media create a blurring line between reality and fiction. Radio serials and in particular radio soap operas have inspired devotion in their listeners to the point where their fans throw themselves wholeheartedly into a universe of outward unreality and inward reality. This leads to framing errors, by which I mean an extension of blurring of reality. We will look at several examples from world radio soaps, including those from the US, Britain, Turkey, France, and Poland. However, radio soap operas do not have a monopoly on the blurring line between reality and fiction. Instead, audio drama is poised to profit well from this uncertainty and has shown itself capable of it many times, beginning in the 1920s in Europe and most famously in War of the Worlds (1938). War of the Worlds is, however, not the end of the story, and the way audio drama uses framing errors continues to this day. The study

This book is a sociohistorical analysis of British and US radio and audio drama from 1919 to the ... more This book is a sociohistorical analysis of British and US radio and audio drama from 1919 to the present day. This volume examines the aesthetic, cultural and technical elements of audio drama along with its context within the literary canon. It provides an exploration of mental imagery generation in relation to its reception and production. Building on historical analysis, the book provides contemporary perspective, drawing on trneds from the current audio drama environment to analyse how people listen to audio drama, including podcast drama, today - and how they might listen in the future.

The audio drama audience in English-speaking countries such as the US, the UK, and New Zealand in... more The audio drama audience in English-speaking countries such as the US, the UK, and New Zealand in the second decade of the twenty-first century faces an embarrassment of riches. Technological advances such as the podcast have made the creation of audio drama easier, less expensive, and potentially more accessible and democratic. While the modes of making audio drama have changed with the technological upsweep to either resemble film location recording or satellite audio drama, as opposed to the traditional studio recording sessions, these practices have not been uniformly adopted. So too have some audiences adapted to listening to audio drama in the car or on MP3 players, but many still listen on more traditional equipment in more traditional settings if provided with the opportunity. Concentrating on three case studies (Misfits Audio's Snape's Diaries, Cooperantem Audio's Der Tickentocker, and BrokenSea Audio's Maudelayne series 1), we look to the future of satellit...

Studies in Comics

This article responds to McCloud's theoretical framework for comics and applies this framewor... more This article responds to McCloud's theoretical framework for comics and applies this framework to audio drama, which I argue is, like comics, a mono-sensory medium (one can only be seen in static image and the other can only be heard); both require a great degree of closure from the audience to frame together sequential narratives (of visual art and sound, respectively). To do this, it uses the case study of Marvel and Stitcher's Wolverine: The Long Night (2018), a 'scripted podcast' (audio drama). While comics are escaping from decades of critical disregard due to their status as a popular or lowbrow medium, radio and by extension audio drama still suffer from critical neglect. It is, therefore, one of the aims of the article to release audio drama theory from torpor by applying theory from comics. W:TLN has been chosen as a case study due to its status as a made-for-podcast story rather than an adaptation from an existing comic book; it also responds to trends with...

Journal of Radio & Audio Media

Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture

At first glance, silent film and audio drama may appear antithetical modes of expression. Neverth... more At first glance, silent film and audio drama may appear antithetical modes of expression. Nevertheless, an interesting tradition of silent film-to-radio adaptations has emerged on BBC Radio Drama. Beyond this link between silent film and radio drama, Neil Brand, a successful silent film accompanist, radio dramatist and composer, links the silent film experience and audio drama in two of his plays, Joanna and Waves Breaking on a Shore. Using theories of sound and narrative in film and radio, as well as discussing the way radio in particular can stimulate the generation of imagery, this article examines layered points of view/audition as ways of linking the silent film experience and the use of sound within radio drama.

During the last ten years the ever-fertile horror and Gothic genres have birthed a new type of fr... more During the last ten years the ever-fertile horror and Gothic genres have birthed a new type of fright-fiction: podcast horror. Podcast horror is a narrative horror form based in audio media and the properties of sound. Despite association with oral ghost tales, radio drama, and movie and TV soundscapes, podcast horror remains academically overlooked. Podcasts offer fertile ground for the revitalization and evolution of such extant audio-horror traditions, yet they offer innovation too. Characterized by their pre-recorded nature, individualized listening times and formats, often " amateur " or non-corporate production, and isolation from an ongoing media stream more typical of radio or TV, podcasts potentialize the instigation of newer audio-horror methods and traits. Podcast horror shows vary greatly in form and content, from almost campfire-style oral tales, comprising listener-produced and performed content (Drabblecast; Tales to Terrify; NoSleep); to audio dramas reminiscent of radio's Golden Era (Tales from Beyond the Pale; 19 Nocturne Boulevard); to dramas delivered in radio-broadcast style (Welcome to Night Vale; Ice Box Theatre); to, most recently, dramas, which are themselves acknowledging and exploratory of the podcast form (TANIS; The Black Tapes Podcast; Lime Town). Yet within this broad spectrum, sympathies and conventions arise which often not only explore and expand notions of Gothic sound, but which challenge broader existing horror and Gothic genre norms. This article thus demonstrates the extent to which podcast horror uses its audio form, technology and mediation to disrupt and evolve Gothic/horror fiction, not through a cumulative chronological formulation of podcast horror but through a maintained and alternately synthesized panorama of forms. Herein new aspects of generic narration, audience, narrative and aesthetic emerge. Exploring a broad spectrum of American and British horror podcasts, this article shows horror podcasting to utilize pod-casting's novel means of horror and Gothic distribution/consumption to create fresh, unique and potent horror forms. This article reveals plot details about some of the podcasts examined.

The Journal of Popular Culture, 2016